Winston Churchill Quotes

It is easier to give directions than advice, and more agreeable to have the right to act, even in a limited sphere, than the privilege to talk at large.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

It was my ambition all of my life to be master of the spoken word.

The worst mistake that a statesman can make is to promise victory and to see it dashed, the hopes dashed.

We must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations

People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and defy the clamor of the multitude are not fit to be ministers in time of difficulty.

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas... I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes... It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases: gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.

A joke is a very serious thing.

You must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes, if you are not to fall back into the rut if inertia, the confusion of aim and the craven fear of being great.

If you simply take up the attitude of defending a mistake, there will no hope of improvement.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest

The cemetery is full of indispensable people.

We Shall come through! We cannot tell when, we cannot tell how, but we shall come through.

I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

I am a man of simple tastes-I am quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

Sometimes our best is simply not enough.... We have to do what is required.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

The question which we must ask ourselves is not whether we like or do not like what is going on, but what we are going to do about it.

Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of society is not natural to mankind.

Censure is often useful, praise is often deceitful.

When I'm in office I always keep Members of Parliament talking. If they stopped they might start thinking.

You know, in war, you don't have to be nice. You only have to be right.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

Your day will go the way the corners of your mouth turn.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

My mother always seemed to me like a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. She shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearly.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

The United States abd usually be reiled on to do the right thing, but only after they have tried all the other alternatives.

There is only one answer to defeat and that is victory.

Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.

There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives.

You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.

When a new book appears one should read an old one.

To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.

Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men.

The man who can master his time can master nearly anything.

They have done what they like. Their difficulty is to like what they have done.

For with primacy in power is also joined an awe inspiring accountability to the future.

We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We ought to break our days and our marches into two.

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

I am your servant. You have the right to dismiss me when you please. What you have no right to do is ask me to bear responsibility without the power of action.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I have always had a curious nature; I enjoy learning, but I dislike being taught.

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 - that is true happiness.

All the great things are simple.

One may imagine that a man who blew the trumpet for his living would be glad to play the violin for his amusement.

Hope has returned to the hearts of scores of millions of men and women, and with that hope there burns the flame of anger against the brutal, corrupt invader ... In a dozen famous ancient States now prostrate under the Nazi yoke, the masses of the people ... await the hour of liberation ... That hour will strike, and its solemn peal will proclaim that the night is past and that the dawn has come.

Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.