Prime Ministers Of The United Kingdom

"Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilisation; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen—we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or—what is perhaps a harder test—a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none."

"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.""

"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?'"

"I certainly shd welcome any approach to Irish unity: but I have 40 years experience of its difficulties. I cd never be a party to the coercion of Ulster to join the Southern counties: but I am much in favour of their being persuaded. The key to this is de Valera showing some loyalty to Crown & Empire."

"I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk — and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods."

"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."

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

"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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 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'!""

"You had Mr. Churchill on the radio explaining that we'd never surrender, and above you had the Spitfire, and you couldn't help thinking: Yes, we can win this thing."

"Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

"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."

"Churchill showed himself formidably equipped to fulfil a role which Scott had always known he could not himself: that of inspirational leader, leading, moreover, in the direction which Scott had mapped out. At its zenith their relationship represented the fusing of such complementary elements as made progressive achievements possible. Nothing could have pleased Scott more than that in May 1909 the fate of the Budget should impel Churchill to come to Manchester to tread out the corn in his best fashion. Here was the right issue and the right man to rally Lancashire to it; and here was Scott, proud to play host to him – surely their finest hour? And throughout 1909 Scott gave what help he could in ensuring that Churchill's important speeches received full-dress treatment in the Guardian."

"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 news from France is very bad, and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune. Nothing will alter our feelings towards them or our faith that the genius of France will rise again. What has happened in France makes no difference to our actions and purpose. We have become the sole champions now in arms to defend the world cause. We shall do our best to be worthy of this high honour. We shall defend our Island home, and with the British Empire we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of mankind. We are sure that in the end all will come right."

"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."

"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."

"Enterprises must be prepared, with specially-trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror down these coasts, first of all on the "butcher and bolt" policy; but later on, or perhaps as soon as we are organised, we could surprise Calais or Boulogne, kill and capture the Hun garrison, and hold the place until all preparations to reduce it by siege or heavy storm have been made, and then away. The passive resistance war, in which we have acquitted ourselves so well, must come to an end. I look to the Joint Chiefs of the Staff to propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline."

"I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since."

"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."

"[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."

"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 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 even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."

"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."

"In the late 1930s, as Britain refused to adapt to the new realities of war, Winston Churchill observed, "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.""

"Every morn brought forth a noble chance, and every chance brought forth a noble knight."

"I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play."

"Meetings between Roosevelt and the JCS were impromptu and usually convened to deal with a specific problem. The President would decide who would attend, presumably those whom he wanted for advice. The record shows that King was in the White House some thirty-two times during 1942, although there may have been other meetings that were not on the President's appointment calendar. The scheduled appointments then diminished for the remainder of the war: eight in 1943, nine in 1944, and one in 1945. In contrast, Churchill met with the British Chiefs of Staff almost daily."

"[F]rom the prisoner's point of view—I am speaking from the prisoner's point of view today—when the Prime Minister [Winston Churchill] was Home Secretary he did more for the prisoners than any Home Secretary we have had in the last 50 years. The speech to which my hon. Friend referred was made when the Prime Minister was Home Secretary in the Liberal Government before the First World War. Anyone who has experienced prison conditions knows that the reforms which the right hon. Gentleman introduced in that period...made more difference to the conditions in prisons than any reforms which have been introduced by other Home Secretaries."

"No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them."

"Every man who's had to command troops in combat has had to look at the big picture. When Harry Truman made the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, he didn't do that assuming he wasn't going to be criticized for it. He was looking at ending the war and saving a million American lives. He provided vision for the nation in spite of the fact that many criticized him then and even more do now. And what about Winston Churchill? He let the Germans bomb the British city of Coventry to protect the fact that the Allies had broken the Germans' code. He allowed the Germans to bomb Coventry because he was looking strategically at ending the war. And he knew if he let it be known that he was reading the Germans' mail, they would immediately change their code. That's thinking strategically versus at the tactical situation. I think everybody who's ever commanded troops has had to look at circumstances strategically. And that amounts to having vision."

"Among the many memorable things Churchill said was this: Talking of Dingra, he said that there had been much discussion in the Cabinet about him. Lloyd George had expressed to him his highest admiration of Dingra's attitude as a patriot, in which he (Churchill) shared. He will be remembered 2,000 years hence, as we remember Regulus and Caractacus and Plutarch's heroes, and Churchill quoted with admiration Dingra's last words as the finest ever made in the name of patriotism."

"I believe we shall make them rue the day they try to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted."

"I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it."

"Many of his speeches will live as examples of human speech at its highest and best, and they will be woven into the fabric of our own history and the history of the world. For many of these speeches made history before our very eyes. They changed the shape of events. They proclaimed the greatness of our past and the nature of our great traditions. They shed a clear light upon the path of duty, and they implanted in ordinary men and women the resolve to make the day of danger their finest hour. They appealed to the noblest and deepest feelings of mankind when discouragement and despair besieged their hearts, and brought triumph out of the jaws of defeat; and many of those speeches will remain a great possession for all time of the country whose interests they preserved and maintained. They will also remain as an undying memorial to the man who made them and became the greatest figure of his age."

"He stands out from his contemporaries as a great and resplendent figure with none to rival him in his many-sidedness... The historians will speak of him as one of the greatest of parliamentarians...they will speak of him as the statesman to whom the whole world looked for guidance when the very skies seemed about to fall; they will recount his mastery of the written and the spoken word; they will discuss every element in his many-sidedness; and the great figure who has dominated our age will take his destined place in the long and noble line of those who...have been clothed with a kind of immortality... Winston Churchill, it may be confidently said, will never be forgotten. He will be remembered beyond all other things as the man who rallied the forces of freedom all over the world when it was confronted by a "monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime"."

"I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called 'disarmament'—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler's puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other hand, we had immense reserves and advantages. And I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."

"Lloyd George was a bigger man than Churchill, and one of the biggest things about Churchill was that he knew it."

"[Winston Churchill] does not talk the language of the 20th century but that of the 18th. He is still fighting Blenheim all over again. His only answer to a difficult situation is send a gun-boat."

"Side by side ... the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue ... mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them ... gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians -- upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall."

"I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. 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 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."

"[O]ne of the greatest Englishmen of our time."

"Right away Churchill jumped up and said: Our entire tragedy is that we have a weak government. The Baldwins are idiots, totally lacking in talent, etc. If England is to be dependent on them, she is lost. They are concerned only with deposing and crowning kings, while Germany is arming and growing stronger, and we are slipping lower and lower. But this situation will not last long. England will wake up and defeat Mussolini and Hitler, and then your hour will also come."

"We have differed and quarrelled in the past but now one bond unites us all—to wage war until victory is won, and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony must be."

"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."

"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.""

"I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister, in a solemn hour of the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom. ... I am sure I speak for all when I say we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it—to any extent that the unwritten laws of war permit. There will be many men and women in this Island who when the ordeal comes upon them, as come it will, will feel comfort, and even a pride, that they are sharing the perils of our lads at the Front—soldiers, sailors and airmen, God bless them—and are drawing away from them a part at least of the onslaught they have to bear. Is not this the appointed time for all to make the utmost exertions in their power?"

"I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened."

"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."

"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."

"I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.' We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. 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 in one word: It is 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."