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Winston Churchill

1874-1965 ,  British Prime Minister, Nobel 1953
Winston ChurchillBritish statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory.

Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a non-academic historian, and a writer (as Winston S. Churchill). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his overall, lifetime body of work.

Churchill is widely regarded as being among the most influential people in British history. He is considered the Greatest Briton of all time (2002 poll).

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Quotations

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

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

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

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.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.

You have enemies? Good. It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.

I’m bored with it all.

(his last words)


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

When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

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

By its sudden collapse, … the proud German army has once again proved the truth of the saying, “The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet”.

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.

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

(about the pilots in the Battle of Britain, 1940)


Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

Diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never!

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to change often.

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 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 f

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

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

Every man should ask himself each day whether he is not too readily accepting negative solutions.

If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.

For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

(on British Labour politician Stafford Cripps)


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

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

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

I never worry about action, but only about inaction.

My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.

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

Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.

(referring to the victory over the Germans at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, in 1942)


Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.

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

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 often no longer strong.

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

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

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

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.

(to Neville Chamberlain after the Munich accords, 1938)


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

It is wonderful what great strides can be made when there is a resolute purpose behind them.

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

(on the new Prime Minister Clement Attlee,1946)


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

The price of greatness is responsibility.

All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.

All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope.

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.

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

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

I hate nobody except Hitler--and that is professional.

In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Good Will.

It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.

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

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

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

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

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.

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.

(on Ramsay MacDonald, he first Labour Party Prime Minister)


When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together-- what do you get? The sum of their fears.

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

The Times is speechless, and takes three columns to express its speechlessness.

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

(on Soviet communism and the Cold War, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946)


Attitude is a little thing that makes a BIG difference.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The maxim “Nothing avails but perfection” may be spelt shorter: “Paralysis.”

We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.

Broadly speaking short words are best and the old words when short, are best of all.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

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

Good and great are seldom in the same man.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

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

In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable.

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.

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

No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

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

The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.

There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

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

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant.

Mediterranean is the soft underbelly of Europe.

(referring to Italy, basically, in discussions with Stalin)


Football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan's game played by gentlemen.


Similar authors and sources of quotations







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