Quotes from Andrew Roberts

The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.' Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804

It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there

More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.

After a victory there are no enemies, only men.'2

have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940

Disaster and treating 'those two impostors just the same'. She added, 'Remember that

Winning is not enough if one doesn't take advantage of success.

Between a battle lost and a battle won,' Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, 'the distance is immense and there stand empires.

How few men are strong enough to stand against the prevailing currents of opinion!

The Great Depression had taken a physical toll on American manhood; even though the Army would accept just about anyone sane over 5 feet tall, 105 pounds in weight, possessing twelve or more of his own teeth, and free of flat feet, venereal disease and hernias, no fewer than 40 per cent of citizens failed these basic criteria.

Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making. Once.'15

Socialism is bad,' he said, 'jingoism is worse, and the two combined in a kind of debased Italian Fascism is the worst creed ever designed by man.

I have never been seduced by prosperity; adversity shall find me superior to its blows.'79

Nelson, the Bible and the island of

None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirit of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazis' first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity . . . Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world.

No one, he said, 'outside a madhouse' would want to start another war, but 'There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective might. There is a nation which with all its strength and virtues is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by Parliament or by public opinion

But what has been begun must be carried through.'86

a new Party will arise like perhaps the Republican Party of the United States of America Ã¢â'¬â€œ rich, materialist, and secular Ã¢â'¬â€œ whose opinions will turn on tariffs, and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.

In 1923 Churchill wrote Clementine 'A Dissertation on Dining Room Chairs' which stated that 'The Dining Room chair has certain very marked requisites.' It needed to be comfortable, have arms and be compact, and the back had to be 'almost perpendicularly over the legs'.37 There also needed to be no fewer than twenty of them. Meals around the circular table in Chartwell's

that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy. What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany

The formal surrender took place shortly after 18.30 hours on Saturday, 22 June 1940, signed by the French General Charles Huntzinger in the same railway carriage at Compiègne, 50 miles north-east of Paris, where the Germans had themselves surrendered in 1918.

Pocas plagas socavan tanto una sociedad como la hiperinflación, y el premio político para el que pudiese acabar con ella era enorme.

You may, by the arbitrary and sterile act of Government,' he said, 'for, remember, Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away Ã¢â'¬â€œ you may put money in the pocket of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.'67 He

Churchill had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol and it rarely affected his judgement.