Quotes from Winston S. Churchill

We remember the sardonic war-time joke about the optimist and the pessimist. The optimist was the man who did not mind what happened so long as it did not happen to him. The pessimist was the man who lived with the optimist.

It is true Greek tragedy, with Chance as the ever ready hand-maid of Fate.

I dont give a shit about a god damn thing.

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

but in front of all, as a special recognition of their devoted valour, marched the Dublin Fusiliers, few, but proud.

The problems of the second year of war must be dealt with by the experience of the first year of war. The problems of the third year of war must be met by results observed and understood in the second, and so on.

I had no idea in those days of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples.

Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art, from which have been derived the foundation of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of manœuvre in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In many such battles the losses of the victors have been small.

It is sometimes pretended that the League of Nations was an American inspiration forced and foisted upon Europe against its froward inclination. The facts are different.

British influence is healthy and kindly, and makes for the general happiness and welfare of mankind.

The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast.

if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.

How hard to build. How easy to evacuate. How hard to capture. How easy to do nothing. How hard to achieve anything. War is action, energy & hazard. These sheep only want to browse among the daisies.

if the issue were presented to the British as a naked trading away of British possessions for sake of the fifty destroyers it would certainly encounter vehement opposition.

Blake: 'Think in the morning; act in the noon; eat in the evening; sleep in the night.

Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

El pan comido es pronto olvidado.

There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.

Not until four centuries had elapsed was Oliver Cromwell by furtive contracts with a moneyed Israelite to open again the coasts of England to the enterprise of the Jewish race. It was left to a Calvinist dictator to remove the ban which a Catholic king had imposed.

The enforcement of the Baldwin-Coolidge debt settlement is a recognisable factor in the economic collapse which was presently to overwhelm the world, to prevent its recovery and inflame its hatreds.

Nothing could ever be thrashed out by correspondence. Principals must be brought together, and plans concerted in common.

We saw a state without a nation, an army without a country, a religion without a God. The Government which claimed to be the new Russia sprang from Revolution and was fed by Terror.