People From Oxford

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth. Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business, as if nothing happened."

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

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

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

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

"I am quite satisfied with my views of India. I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indian."

"The Balkans produce more history than they can consume (also reported in the form: The peoples of the Balkans produce more history than they can consume, and the weight of their past lies oppressively on their present.)"

"Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles."

"There is no such thing as a good tax."

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

"The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists."

"There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse."

"An empty taxi arrived and out of it stepped Attlee."

"All this contains much that is obviously true, and much that is relevant; unfortunately, what is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is not obviously true."

"You make a living by what you get; you make a life by what you give."

"The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."

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

"The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine."

"People often forget that in 1940 there was no guarantee that we were going to win."

"Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential."

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

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

"I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself."

"A joke is a very serious thing."

"The idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the cruelest delusions which has befuddled the human mind."

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

"Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee. Churchill: If I were your husband I'd drink it."

"George Bernard Shaw is said to have told W.S.C.: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one. W.S.C. to G.B.S.: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one."

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

"Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives."

"Gentlemen, We Have Run Out Of Money; Now We Have to Think"

"Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions"

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

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm"

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

"Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an own exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit anymore."

"We have slaughtered the wrong pig."

"Having...announced his "Four Years Plan", Churchill was sincere enough in his commitment to social reform. If a Churchill Government had been elected in 1945 some form of National Health Service would have been introduced, along with comprehensive social insurance and policies to maintain full employment."

"Churchill's general conception of British history was also, in a sense, commonplace. It was a romantic Whig history: the story of the growth of liberty and representative institutions at home, in parallel with the rise of Britain as a great power overseas. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Great Reform Act of 1832 were accompanied by Blenheim, Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was a story, besides, of great men: great parliamentarians like Hampden or Pitt, and great commanders like Cromwell or Nelson. But this was the point at which the national myth of Whig history merged into the family myth of Winston Churchill. Among the great men of history were Churchill's father, Lord Randolph, and his ancestor, John Churchill, the first duke of Marlborough. It was they who provided the link between Churchill's conceptions of British history, and his sense of personal destiny. The Glorious Revolution, and the rise of Britain as a great power, were exemplified for Churchill by the career of Marlborough. The rise of parliamentary democracy was exemplified by the career of Lord Randolph. Churchill came to see his own life as a re-enactment and continuation of theirs."

"Political pundits have a saying that a great leader needs three things: brains, heart, and guts, or its modern variant, balls. Churchill, for example, had all three. Now start doing your own sums: FDR surely had all three; Nixon had brains and guts, but not much heart. Reagan had a good facsimile of a heart, but not much of a brain..."

"I can say here and now, with no hesitation whatever, that if it had not been for him this nation would not have survived the year 1940, and would not have steeled itself to meet its tasks in the years afterwards."

"[T]he splendid leadership he gave this country and the Commonwealth from the moment he became Prime Minister in the Second World War—a leadership which not only saved the freedom and genius of Europe's most civilised peoples from eclipse, but also carried Britain triumphant with no more than a third of her former sacrifice of life through a Second World War half as long again as the First... Not one, in fact, of the great Englishmen who have possessed the priceless combination of political and military sense...has surpassed Churchill in the distinctive genius for statesmanship in peace and war on which the greatness of this little island has been built, namely, an infallible instinct for the balance of power indispensable to its security, alertness to any threatened disturbance of that balance however far ahead, and imaginative resource, when the balance has been disturbed, in righting it by the most effective and economical use of our always inadequate strength. It is due, I repeat, to this, the dominant element in his genius, that Western Europe is not at this moment a dependency of either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia."

"[The War] at once raised issues which transcended all party divisions and, obliterating all the questions of the passing hour, linked up the England of to-day with the England that fought the Spanish Armada, that humbled Louis XIV and wore down Napoleon. In that new, that eternal England, he by natural right came into his own. He is to-day the spirit of old England incarnate, with its unshakeable self-confidence, its grim gaiety, its unfailing sense of humour, its underlying moral earnestness, its unflinching tenacity. Against that inner unity of spirit between leader and nation the ill-cemented moral fabric of Hitler's perversion of the German soul must be shattered in the end."

"The world depends on the United States to shape history. No person recognized this fact better than Winston Churchill, whose nation depended on American intervention in the Second World War. At the time, he wrote, "How heavily do the destinies of this generation hang upon the government and people of the United States... Will the United States throw their weight into the scales of peace and law and freedom while time remains, or will they remain spectators until the disaster has occurred; and then, with infinite cost and labor, build up what need not have been cast down?""

"I wish I knew as much about anything as that young man knows about everything."

"It must be a melancholy satisfaction to see how right you were... Let's hope it's not too late."

"You may have the best machinery in the world, you may have adequate supplies of munitions, you may have the men, you may have the generals; but wars are fought out eventually always as contests of will, and there are needed in the responsible positions men who are prepared to give decisions, who are not afraid to take risks, men of inflexible will-power. In all these respects, I say, from very close working with him for the last two years, that we have in the Prime Minister a leader in war such as this country has rarely had in its long history."

"One of these days I'll make a few casual remarks about Winston. Not a speech—no oratory—just a few words in passing. I've got it all ready. I am going to say that when Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said "No one person has a right to so many gifts", picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice."

"Stalin's strategy at the end of World War II was to acquire a small "buffer zone between Russia and Germany, consisting of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and most of Germany. In an effort to garner public support in these nations, Stalin mounted a public-relations campaign around the upbeat theme "Maybe We Won't Have Your Whole Family Shot," and in 1945 Eastern Europe decided to join the Communist bloc by a vote of 28,932,084,164,504,029-0. Heartened by this mandate, Stalin immediately ordered construction work to begin on the Iron Curtain, which was given its name by Sir Winston Churchill, who, in a historic anecdote at a dinner party, said, "Madam, I may be drunk, but an iron curtain has descended upon BLEAAARRRGGGHHH.""

"The government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show...he papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic"... the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week... The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic". Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed... But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid...The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."