All Quotes

"I decided to keep the Rembrandt Peale portrait of George Washington that Dad and Bill Clinton had placed over the mantel. I added busts of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill- a gift on loan from the British government courtesy of Prime Minister Tony Blair. I had told Tony that I admired Churchill's courage, principle, and sense of humor- all of which I thought were necessary for leadership."

"[I]t does seem true, almost a truism, that Churchill's famous phrases – 'blood, sweat, toil and tears', 'their finest hour', 'we shall never surrender' – did express something inarticulate, perhaps dormant but perhaps not, in the hearts and minds of his countrymen, of most classes. They achieved their effect by a heroic yet very simple expression of the will to resist ('we shall fight them in the hills') and by invoking the naïve sense of nationhood and history which most of his literate subjects shared with him... Churchill clearly achieved and retained a popularity far greater than – because different in kind from – that of any peacetime leader... He radiated his courage over the microphone as successfully as he pumped blood into the sclerotic arteries of the House of Commons... And, whatever their private opinions, all classes were clear that there nowhere was, nor ever had been, anyone quite like this man they were cheering. Such singularity, in such a high position, could only amount to greatness."

"The men were thrilled to see him. I've never seen such enthusiasm. It's not surprising—he has such presence—such personality—also the man in the street realizes that he has been right in everything he has said since 1933. Those in high places say he's finished—I don't believe it. He has a following in the country far bigger than those in Westminster think."

"Look, if Churchill hadn't done what he did to defeat the Nazis, you wouldn't be here, none of us would be here. What is more, we have to take a special interest in him because he, too, led a little island against a great enemy."

"The Prime Minister made an important and moving statement. I sat behind him...and he was eloquent, and oratorical, and used magnificent English; several Labour Members cried. He hinted that we might be obliged to fight alone, without France, and that England might well be invaded."

"Churchill's associations with Scott's Manchester was part of his education as a Liberal, and he emerged as not only an eloquent but also an effectual exponent of Scott's kind of progressivism... From his Manchester base Churchill became, almost at a bound, a Radical leader... When Churchill was beaten in the Manchester North West by-election, the Guardian mourned the party loss as less than the "irreparable" personal loss of "a rising and formative political force which we would gladly have kept for our special help and service"."

"The little band that Churchill called into his confidence included...myself... All of us were obsessed with the German peril and the nakedness of our country to meet it, and Winston was galvanic in collecting the latest information to place before us. I have vivid recollections of his prophetic warnings couched in such terms of urgency that none of us could fail to realise that here was a patriot who was prepared to stake everything in rousing his countrymen to action... I can see the great man now pacing the floor of my drawing room...delivering short pungent sentences such as, "at this moment all through Germany the factories are lit up, the clanging of hammers goes on all night, and the only answering British sound is the snoring of 'X'!""

"Every day there are four or five columns in the Manchester Guardian consecrated to his honour."

"He is much more attractive than the Edens and other gentlemanly wishy-washies. He is a real tough and at the moment talking our language."

"He was quite magnificent. The man, and the only man we have, for this hour... As we separated several of us went up and spoke to him. He had risen from the long table and was standing in front of the fireplace. I patted him on the back and said: 'Well done, Prime Minister! You ought to get that cartoon of Low, showing us all rolling up our sleeves and falling in behind you, and frame it and stick it up there'. He answered with a broad grin, 'Yes, that was a good one, wasn't it?'"

"A British soldier once described Winston Spencer Churchill as "a pugnacious looking b[astard]." Others mistakenly regarded Churchill's plump figure as the affirmation of a jolly fat man. One historian has aptly described him as resembling a cherubic, jumbo-size baby with a cigar stuck in its mouth. There are hardly sufficient adjectives in the English language to describe the British wartime prime minister, but a descriptive (and contradictory) few will suffice. Churchill was brilliant, pampered, petulant, romantic, pragmatic, courageous, egotistical, eccentric, possessed of enormous perseverance, opinionated beyond measure, and impossibly demanding; furthermore, he drank too much, suffered from depression (his "black dog"), "waddled rather than walked," and by any criterion ought to have been too old to carry the enormous burden of a prolonged war that threatened Britain's very existence. His mood swings were legion and ranged from tears to jokes- on occasion at one and the same time. Eisenhower tells the tale of meetings during which "I've seen tears run over his chin." During one such encounter Eisenhower had just rejected as impossible something Churchill wanted done in Italy. "He painted a terrible picture if we didn't do it... He said, 'if that should happen I should have to go to His Majesty and lay down the mantle of my high office.' And here were tears running down. But within ten seconds he was telling a joke... The man could use pathos, humor, anecdote, history, anything to get his way." Warts and all, Winston Churchill nevertheless represented the indomitable spirit of a defiant nation under siege. His oratory was stirring, and like FDR's, it galvanized an entire nation. In 1939 when Lord Halifax suggested that Britain make peace with Hitler, Churchill not only declined but instead vowed to rescue "mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened the stained pages of history.""

"Winston Churchill was unlike anyone Eisenhower had ever met. Though he was a megalomaniac on a par with MacArthur, Churchill elicited a wholly contrary response from Eisenhower, whose aversion to big egos was built on a lifetime of experience with such men. With Churchill, Eisenhower found himself up against a powerful personality- with a penchant for the dramatic gesture- in whom were combined politician, statesman, warlord, and frustrated soldier would much rather have been on the battlefield commanding troops: The latter he had in common with Eisenhower."

"Winston Churchill, who worried about the "pan-Asian malaise" and the looming "shadow of Asiatic solidarity," was himself inordinately fond of the racial slurs that were guaranteed to alienate Asian peoples. His Chinese allies remained "little yellow men" to him, even as the same phrase became an everyday expression in discussions of the Japanese enemy."

"All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been."

"A later call on President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, a guest at the White House, was no more than an informal chat. It had no military significance, but it was the first time I ever had a personal talk with either of these two men. Tobruk, in the African desert, had just fallen to the Germans and the whole Allied world was thrown into gloom. These two leaders, however, showed no signs of pessimism. It was gratifying to note that they were thinking of attack and victory, not of defense and defeat."

"An inspirational leader, he seemed to typify Britain's courage and perseverance in adversity and its conservatism in success... He was a great war leader and he is a great man."

"His vitality, his brainpower, his endurance, his wit, his eloquence, his industry, his application were superabundant, superhuman. The first and last impression left by the Colosseum concerns its size. So with Churchill: the man was huge. Then, also, for the bulk of the British adult population, the moment which must stand out most proudly in their collective memory was 1940. More deliberately than at any other time in its history the nation united in a good cause... That was their finest hour. Churchill was the prime organiser, the voice, the symbol and the historian of those great days... His precise virtue then was that he represented his countrymen in that crisis better than at any other moment in his career. He exemplified, in word and deed – more, in every inflection and gesture – the untiring, resplendent courage which the hour demanded... Rarely were the needs of a nation and the chief quality of its leader better matched than in 1940. Nothing can ever take that from him. No one in his senses will ever try."

"I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill."

"He would often go into no-man's-land. It was a nerve-wracking experience to go with him. He would call out in his loud, gruff voice—far too loud it seemed to us—"You go that way, I will go this... Come here, I have found a gap in the German wire. Come over here at once!" He was like a baby elephant out in no-man's-land at night. He never fell when a shell went off; he never ducked when a bullet went past with its loud crack. He used to say, after watching me duck: "It's no damn use ducking; the bullet has gone a long way past you by now.""

"[Churchill] said, "You were very rude to me, you know." I told him, "Yes, but you were rude too." Then, with just a hint of a smile, he looked up and said blandly, "Yes, but I am a great man." There was no answer to that. He knew, as I and the rest of the world knew, that he was right."

"As early as 1919, Churchill, then a cabinet minister in Lloyd George's government, foresaw the potential for German-Soviet collaboration."

"Winston Churchill famously claimed that of all human qualities, courage was the most esteemed, because it guaranteed all others."

"Unfortunately, as he quickly discovered, the governor had fallen prey to the hazard of “Churchillian Drift,” attributing an aphorism of unknown origin to Winston Churchill."

"Finally, a word about British objectives. They were, as Churchill defined them, much simpler: to survive at all costs, even if this meant relinquishing leadership of the Anglo-American coalition to Washington, even if it meant weakening the British empire, even if it also meant collaborating with the Soviet Union, a regime the younger Churchill had hoped, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, to crush. The British would attempt to influence the Americans as much as possible—they aspired to the role of Greeks, tutoring the new Romans—but under no circumstances would they get at odds with the Americans. Stalin's expectation of an independent Britain, capable of resisting the United States and even going to war with it, would have seemed strange indeed to those who actually shaped British wartime and postwar grand strategy."

"He ought to be the Minister of Supply if we are in for a crisis. His energy and fiery brain seem unimpaired with age. He is certainly not dismayed by our difficulties. He says that our rulers are now beginning to get frightened... He said that sometimes he couldn't sleep at night thinking of our dangers, how all this wonderful Empire which had been built up so slowly and so steadily might all be dissipated in a minute. He was just the stuff required in an emergency. The thing is to say when the emergency has arrived."

"I keep thinking of Winston Churchill down at Westerham, full of patriotism and ideas for saving the Empire. A man who knows that you must act to win. You cannot remain supine and allow yourself to be hit indefinitely. Winston must be chafing at the inaction. I keep thinking of him walking up and down the room."

"In Winston Churchill we have a man capable of keeping up the courage of the people. Thank God for that. I know no one else amongst our political leaders who can do it."

"[T]he upsurge of the national spirit was largely his own creation. The great qualities of the British race had seemed almost dormant until he had aroused them. The people then saw themselves as he portrayed them. They put their trust in him. They were ready to do anything that he asked, make any sacrifice that he demanded, and follow wherever he led."

"To the occupied nations in Europe he was already the living symbol of resistance and hope. Only if Britain was victorious could they regain their freedom, and they felt that if anyone could bring about that victory, it was Churchill. Travelling in Scandinavia and the Low Countries after the war, this was the sort of thing that I heard on all sides: "You in England had no idea what Churchill meant to us. We used to sit in dark cellars with the wireless turned on as low as possible, and while one of our number patrolling the streets would keep a look out for the Gestapo, we would strain our ears to catch his every word. His voice was the only ray of light in an otherwise completely dark and hopeless world.""

"I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street."

"He never over-claimed his part in 1940. Disaster had united rather than disrupted the people of Britain as he knew it would. Although as a nation we were alone, as individuals we were all in it together. He felt our temper exactly... But it was not to his eloquence, or even to his humour, alone that we responded; disaster had struck the scales from our eyes, and suddenly we saw the towering courage that had been Churchill's all his life. We all knew, in that instinctive way that tells true from false, that here was a man who would stand to the last; and in this confidence we could stand with him."

"Unlike modern military operations, whose names are chosen for their public relations value, operations in World War II were christened on the governing principle that the name should give no hint of the objective. To this, Winston Churchill added a second requirement: operations should not be given boastful or frivolous monikers. As he told Pug Ismay, "Intelligent thought will already supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names that do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called 'BUNNYHUG' or 'BALLYHOO'."

"I know I speak for all Americans, your fellow citizens, in extending warmest congratulations and affectionate best wishes on your 90th birthday. As you celebrate this milestone in a full and eventful life we remember with gratitude, and future generations will continue to do so, your magnificent eloquence, your unfailing courage and your great service to the cause of freedom and human dignity."

"Perhaps if the British people could speak, they would ask for peace. But since the official voice of England asks not for peace but for destruction, it is destruction we must provide."

"In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life—he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

"One day during the conference King lunched alone with Mr. Churchill and enjoyed the opportunity for an extended conversation. So convincingly did the Prime Minister speak that King, as he remarked afterward, kept his hand on his watch. Had this cherished personal belonging been asked of him, he might not have known how to refuse it! Although King was not in accord with the suggestions of operations in the eastern Mediterranean and an attack on the soft underbelly of Europe, he was in hearty agreement with Mr. Churchill's desire to clear the enemy out of North Africa so that Allied shipping might freely use the Mediterranean and avoid the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope."

"In King's view, there could have been no finer comrades-in-arms for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff than the Prime Minister and the British Chiefs of Staff. King both respected and enjoyed Mr. Churchill. The two men were similar in their entire frankness and their determination in pursuing given thoughts and courses of action. From time to time they collided, but basically they understood one another."

"Peace with Germany and Japan on our terms will not bring much rest to you and me (if I am still responsible). As I observed last time, when the war of the giants is over, the war of the pygmies will begin."

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

"The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black."

"The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short."

"Christopher Soames, Churchill's future son-in-law, remembered] Churchill showing him around Chartwell Farm [around 1946]. When they came to the piggery Churchill scratched one of the pigs and said: I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

"Meeting Roosevelt was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne."

"I think 'No Comment' is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again."

"The very first thing the President did was to show me the new Presidential Seal, which he had just redesigned. He explained, 'The seal has to go everywhere the President goes. It must be displayed upon the lectern when he speaks. The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re-designed it so that it now faces the olive branches ... what do you think?' I said, 'Mr. President, with the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle's neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.'"

"When I was a young subaltern in the South African War, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to put a bit of whiskey in it. By diligent effort I learned to like it."

"A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.... From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."

"We must build a kind of United States of Europe."

"We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past."

"Is there any need for further floods of agony? Is the only lesson of history to be that mankind is unteachable? Let there be justice, mercy and freedom. The people have only to will it, and all will achieve their hearts' desire."