Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was a was a British politician, army officer, and writer. He was born in Oxfordshire on 30 November 1874. Winston became a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He was the one to represent five constituencies during his lifetime as a Member of Parliament (MP). He was also one of the members of the Conservative Party, and he led it from 1940 to 1955, but a couple of years before he was a member of the Liberal Party.
Winston was raised in an English- American aristocratic family and his parents were very rich. Since he had joined the British Army, he was a part of actions in British India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second Boer War. He became famous as a war correspondent wrote and published many books about his career and campaigns. Winston Churchill is considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important people and is still very popular and respected in the UK and other countries. He died in 1965. in London, England.
These are some of Winston Churchill’s best quotes of all time.
- “The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.”
- “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
- “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
- “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”
- “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”
- “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”
- “This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a war of the Unknown Warriors, but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.”
- “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
- “If you are going through hell, keep going.”
- “My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.”
- “If you cannot read all your books…fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
- “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
- “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
- “All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.”
- “Attitude is a little thing that makes a BIG difference.”
- “Don’t give your son money. As far as you can afford it, give him horses. No one ever came to grief, except honorable grief, through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course, they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.”
- “Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.”
- “For the first 25 years of my life, I wanted freedom. For the next 25 years, I wanted to order. For the next 25 years, I realized that order is freedom.”
- “Use simple words everyone knows, then everyone will understand.”
- “You create your universe as you go along.”
- “Where there is a great power, there is a great responsibility.”
- “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
- “Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
- “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, but we shall never surrender.”
- “He has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.”
- “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
- “Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking our potential.”
- “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however, the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”
- “I like a man who grins when he fights.”
- “Time and money are largely interchangeable terms.
- “Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”
- “War is very cruel. It goes on for so long.”
- “If we win, nobody will care. If we lose, there will be nobody to care.”
- “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
- “When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.”
- “Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”
- “I have never accepted what many people have kindly said, namely that I have inspired the nation. It was the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe that had the lionheart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”
- “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
- “To each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
- “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, the danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop.”
- “Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself, believe.”
- “Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”
- “Everyone has his day, and some days last longer than others.”
- “Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”
- “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”
- “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”
- “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
- “At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and advances until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his place….”
- “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a a tremendous whack.”
- “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
- “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.”
- “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
- “Do not let us speak of darker days; let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived. ”
- “In war, as in life, it is often necessary, when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.”
- “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
- “We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbor of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.”
- “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
- “If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
- “In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.”
- “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”
- “When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.”
- “In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity In Peace: Good Will.”
- “A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn’t happen.”
- “There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.”
- “One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.”
- “No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.”
- “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the hard may be; for without victory there is no survival. ”
- “My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.”
- “There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.”
- “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”
- “A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.”
- “You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police … yet in their hearts, there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
- “You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth. ”
- “Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] … by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks … to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly.”
- “Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut.”
- “And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honor, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.”
- “Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.”
- “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. ”
- “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
- “Evils can be created much quicker than they can be cured.”
- “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”
- “Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.”
- “The first duty of the university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities. We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.”
- “There is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has its exceptions.”
- “There comes a precious moment in all of our lives when we are tapped on the shoulder and offered the opportunity to do something very special that is unique to us and our abilities, what a tragedy it would be if we are not ready or willing.”
- “Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.”
- “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
- “The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye. ”
- “A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”
- “When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.”
- “When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
- “For myself, I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.”
- “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.”
- “This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.”
- “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”
- “I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”
- “Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
- “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
- “A change is as good as a rest.”
- “We are the masters of our fate.”
