Quote: There is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can d...

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, And when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Vast and fearsome as the human scene has become, personal contact of the right people, in the right places, at the right time, may yet have a potent and valuable part to play in the cause of peace which is in our hearts.

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

A joke is a very serious thing.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Without victory there is no survival!

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

Kites rise highest against the wind not with it.

My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others.

Danger - if you meet it promptly and without flinching - you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from Anything. Never!

Democracy is the worst system devised by the wit of man, except for all the others.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The United States is a land of free speech. Nowhere is speech freer not even here where we sedulously cultivate it even in its most repulsive form.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. Ignorance may deride it. But in the end, there it is.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.

Odd things: animals. All dogs look up to you. All cats look down to you. Only the pig looks at you as an equal.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Adlai Stevenson, himself a notable speaker, often reminisced about his last meeting with Churchill. I asked him on whom or what he had based his oratorical style. Churchill replied, 'It was an American statesman who inspired me and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ.' Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockrans speeches of 60 years before. 'He was my model,' Churchill said. 'I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.'

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England he should have said Britain, of course always wins one battle the last. Eleutherios Venizelos, 1864-1936, Greek statesman.

The British nation is unique in this respect, They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

The British people are good all through. You can test them as you would put a bucket into the sea and always find it salt.

For each and for all, as for the Royal Navy, the watchword should be, 'Carry on, and dread nought.'

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful womanthey remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils.

Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning.

It is not open to the cool bystander ... to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which would never have occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time.

In those days he was wiser than he is now he used frequently to take my advice.

The Americans will always do the right thing ... after they've exhausted all the alternatives.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation....

The English never draw a line without blurring it.

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice. Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

Courage is the finest of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.

Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the 'worst' form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world ... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Don't argue about difficulties. The difficulties will argue for themselves.

There are men in the world who derive an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as other from success.

'Mr. Churchill, you're drunk!' Yes, I am; and you are ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

The empires of the future are empires of the mind.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl no superior alternative has yet been found.

He [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] died in harness, and we may well say in battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors and airmen who died side by side with ours and carrying out their tasks to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

The Battle of Britain.... The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the was.... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth, last for a thousand years, man will say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.

We get to make a living; we give to make a life.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt.... Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact I will ever say pedantic observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths. We have little control over the future; and none at all over the past.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fate may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces.... So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.

I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.

The surest road to health, say what they will, Is never to suppose we shall be ill; Most of those evils we poor mortals know, From doctors and imagination flow.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

It cannot in the opinion of His Majestys Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

Elderly people and those in authority cannot always be relied upon to take enlightened and comprehending views of what they call the indiscretions of youth.

We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.

I'm bored with it all. Before slipping into a coma. He died 9 days later.

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

On the outcome of World War II: It was the nation and the race dwelling all 'round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the lion's roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right place to use his claws.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.

Young people at universities study to achieve knowledge and not to learn a trade. We must all learn how to support ourselves, but we must also learn how to live. We need a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of modern engineers.

By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys.... I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English; I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.

Danger if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about.

Don't talk to me about Naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never in nothing, great or small, large or petty never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. See Shakespear, King Lear, Act V, scene iii. and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 'Never ... Lay Down Arms'

Never give in. Never. Never. Never. Never.

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.

I think 'No comment' is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again. I got it from Sumner Welles. To reporters at the Washington airport, after conferring with President Truman at the White House, February 12, 1946

When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

We will have no truce or parley with you [Hitler], or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst and we will do our best.

It would be an inconvenient rule if nothing could be done until everything can be done.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

Winston Churchill, for his part, regarded Gandhi with not a little contempt, describing the 'Mahatma' as a dangerous charlatan: 'It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of King-Emperor.'

Here Churchill repeats with approval a statement he had first made in January, 1930 'at a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel.' 'Sooner or later you will have to crush Gandhi and the Indian Congress and all they stand for.'

In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. Of Stanley Baldwins policies.

These are not dark days: these are great days the greatest days our country has ever lived.

The farther backwards you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Never, never, never, never give up.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.

Never give up. Never, never give up!. We shall go on to the end.

We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

'Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea!' 'And if you were my wife, I would drink it!'

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not put.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.

There is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do, and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life, has its exceptions.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

Responsibility is the price of greatness.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They keep their own secrets alike from foe and friends.

All the great things are simple.

The soft underbelly of the Axis.

There was a man who sold a hyena skin while the beast still lived and who was killed in hunting it.

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it the third time a tremendous whack.

Do not let us speak of darker days, let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great daysthe greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.

What kind of people do they [the Japanese] think we are?

If you try to set forth in a catalogue what will be the exact settlement of an affair you will find that the moment you leave the area of pious platitude you will descend into the arena of heated controversy.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations.'

Victory is the beautiful, bright-colored flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed.

... You ask, What is our policy? I will say; It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

I had a feeling once about Mathematics that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me the Byss and Abyss. I saw as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.

In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill.

When I warned [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, 'In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.' Some chicken; some neck.

This is no time to speak of the hopes of the future, or the broader world which lies beyond our struggles and our victory. We have to win that world for our children. We have to win it by our sacrifices. We have not won it yet. The crisis is upon us.... In this strange, terrible world war there is a place for everyone, man and woman, old and young, hale and halt; service in a thousand forms is open. There is no room now for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. The mine, the factory, the dockyard, the salt sea waves, the fields to till, the home, the hospital, the chair of the scientist, the pulpit of the preacher from the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.... And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empires beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the fight, until in Gods own time the new world in its power and might steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

There is no room for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. The mine, the factory, the dockyard, the salt sea waves, the field to till, the home, the hospital, the chair of the scientist, the pulpit of the preacher from the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play.

When I look back on all the worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest.

The German dictator, instead of snatching the victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.

Things do not get better by being left alone. Unless they are adjusted, they explode with a shattering detonation,

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

The maxim of the British people is 'Business as usual.'

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature. Dr. George H. Gallup founded his Institute of Public Opinion in England in 1936.

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

On the night of the 10th of May [1940], at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so,I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings.

Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed, he has a lot to be modest about.

'Not in vain' may be the pride of those who survived and the epitaph of those who fell. The eight thousand paratroopers of the First British Airborne Division who landed in Arnhem, Holland, behind the German lines and held the area for nine days and nights, with a loss of six thousand. [September 1944] Major General R. E. Urquhart, the division commander radioed to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery: All will be ordered to break out rather than surrender.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

A vile race of quislings to use the new word which will carry the scorn of mankind down the centuries. Vidkun Quisling, head of the Nasjonal Samling party in Norway, who cooperated and collaborated with Nazis when Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940. Quisling was executed on October 23, 1945.

I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Kites rise highest against the wind; not with it.

... man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The heights of great men reached and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upwards in the night.

Laws just or unjust may govern men's actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.

Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

When you are winning a war, almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other forms which have been tried from time to time.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.

It is a socialist ideal that making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.

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