Winston Churchill Quotes

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

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

When Iraq becomes strong enough in our opinion to stand alone, we shall be in a position to state that our task has been fulfilled, and that Iraq is an independent sovereign state. But this cannot be said while we are forced year after year to spend very large sums of money on helping the Iraqi government to defend itself and maintain order.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.

I have found in my experience of war, that plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.

Never stand so high upon a principle that you cannot lower it to suit the circumstances.

There never will be enough for everything while the world goes on. The more that is given the more there will be needed.

A joke is a very serious thing.

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

Russian may seem narrow-minded, impudent, or even stupid people, but can only pray for those who are against them.

Old men make war, young men fight and die

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.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.

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

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia.

Why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent? And why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings and help to shape the onward destinies of men?

The price of greatness is responsibility.

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.

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

The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.

I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters.

Rules were made for fools to follow and wise men to be guided by.

Lots of folks are forced to skimp to support a government that won't.

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

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

My mother made a brilliant impression upon my childhood life. She shone for me like the evening star.

Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

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

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken.

You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it is they who made it famous.

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Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

I am not sure I should have dared to start; but I am sure that I should not have dared to stop.

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

If you travel the earth, you will find it is largely divided into two classes of people-people who say 'I wonder why such and such is not done" and people who say "Now who is going to prevent me from doing that thing?"

Now that we are, as you say, 'in the same boat,' would it not be wise for us to have another conference ... and the sooner the better.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.