Quotes By Winston Churchill

We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.

[President Roosevelt] devised the extraordinary measure of assistance called Lend- Lease, which will stand forth as the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history.

To sit at one's table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a Squeezer pen [laughter]-that is true happiness.

It was great fun writing a book.... It built an impalpable crystal sphere around one of interests and ideas. In a sense one felt like a goldfish in a bowl; but in this case the goldfish made his own bowl. This came along everywhere with me. It never got knocked about in travelling, and there was never a moment when agreeable occupation was lacking. Either the glass had to be polished, or the structure extended or contracted, or the walls required strengthening.

Clarity and cogency can be reconciled with a greater brevity...it is slothful not to compress your thoughts.

I have always been very much struck by the advantage enjoyed by people who lived at an earlier period of the world than one's own. They had the first opportunity of saying the right thing. Over and over again it has happened to me to think of something which I thought was worth saying, only to find that it had been already exploited, and very often spoiled, before I had an opportunity of saying it.

And what a noble medium the English language is. It is not possible to write a page without experiencing positive pleasure at the richness and variety, the flexibility and the profoundness of our mother-tongue.

In all correspondence, it would be more convenient to use the word "Persia" instead of "Iran," as otherwise dangerous mistakes may easily occur through the similarity of Iran and Iraq....Formal correspondence with the Persian Government should of course be conducted in the form they like.

[I am] horribly entangled with the Ancient Britons, the Romans, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, all of whom I thought I had escaped from for ever when I left school!

The greatest tie of all is language.... Words are the only things that last for ever. The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of Time. The Pyramids moulder, the bridges rust, the canals fill up, grass covers the railway track; but words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but with all their pristine vital force.

To have a second language at your disposal, even if you only know it enough to read it with pleasure, is a sensible advantage....to secure the enormous boon of access to a second literature. Choose well, choose wisely, and choose one.

All was there the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

These gentlemen of the press were listening carefully to every word you said-all eagerly anxious for a tiny morsel of cheese which they could publish. And you go and give them a whole ruddy Stilton!

The congestion of Parliament is a disease, but the futility of Parliament is a mortal disease.

Parliament can compel people to obey or to submit, but it cannot compel them to agree.

It is only the continuance of the war and the extraordinary conditions which it imposes and forces upon us all that justifies us in remaining together as a Parliament. I certainly could not take the responsibility of making far-reaching controversial changes which I am not convinced are directly needed for the war effort, without a Parliament refreshed by contact with the electorate.

Much might be said for and against the two-Party system. But no one can doubt that it adds to the stability and cohesion of the State. The alternation of Parties in power, like the rotation of crops, has beneficial results. Each of the two Parties has services to render in the development of the national life; and the succession of new and different points of view is a real benefit to the country.

These are the qualifications of a good Party man-you must know how to put your Party before yourself, and you must know the occasions when to put nation before Party.

[Mr. Attlee, then Prime Minister] the other day accused me of being party minded. Everyone would naturally be shocked if a party leader were party minded! But we are all party minded in the baffling and unhappy period between election decisions.

The dignity of a Prime Minister, like a lady's virtue, is not susceptible of partial diminution.