In this book you will find the best ripe plums of humour taken from Churchill's many gems of wit. To anyone who wishes to have a generous source of quotations, this is the one.
Churchill address audiences for seven decades. This tiny tome featuring a faux leather binding with embossed type and illustration is filled with Winston Churchill's biography, his most inspirational quotes, and excerpts from some of his most famous speeches.
How right was Mr. Cleveland, OH: World, But we do not make love collectively and the ladies do not marry us collectively.
Socialism destroys all this. There is an interval of uncertain length before sensation is renewed. The shock numbs but does not paralyze; the wound bleeds but does not smart. So it is with the great reverses of life. Experiments may or may not be fruitful. It is taking place without injury or injustice to anyone; it is transforming waste places into fertile; it is planting trees and developing agriculture in desert lands; it is making for an increase in wealth and of cultivation; it is making two blades of grass from where one grew before.
The most formidable obstacles lie at the beginning. Once these have been surmounted, the path is comparatively smooth. Their insincerity? Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people? Superiority of intellect! Then, when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average.
They come from within…. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people, always found in our country, who if they add something to our culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.
It is not too late to stem these subversive and degenerating tides you see working and flowing in every direction. Let them eliminate them from their politics and programmes. Let them abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality…they will increase the well-being of the world. You cannot judge the passing of laws by Parliament as you would judge the output of an efficient Chicago bacon factory.
A brake, in its essence, is one-sided; it prevents an accident through going too fast. It was not intended to prevent accidents through going too slow. For that you must look elsewhere…. You must look to the engine and of course to the petrol supply. It has vanished. Now we must think of the leisured masses.
Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interest; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way they can be safely and justly preserved, namely 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, and shall seek more in the future, to build a minimum standard for the mass.
Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly. It is a disease of the will power. I am content with the decision I took on both occasions. I have never had cause to regret either. We live in the most thoughtless of ages.
Everyday headlines and short term views. Anesthesia, and pure and chaste St. Antiseptic…and if I had a vote, I should be bound to celebrate St.
They are ready to die for the truth if they only knew what the truth was. Their sacrifice was not in vain. The young sow wild oats, the old grow sage. The sum total of their fears. She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly but at a distance. Take off your clothes and get into bed. Its growth is more like that of a plant or a tree…. No one should ever cut one down without planting another. It is very much easier to cut down trees than to grow them. Wrongs will be forgiven, sufferings and losses will be forgiven or forgotten, battles will be remembered only as they recall the martial virtues of the combatants; but anything like chicanery, anything like a trick will always rankle.
Churchill was describing the threat of submarine attack. It would be an unmeasured and immeasurable blunder to make peace before the vital objects are achieved. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley. May we all come through safe and with honour. Both sides know that it would begin with horrors of a kind and on a scale never dreamed of before by human beings.
Beware, I say! Time may be short. Our chance is now at hand. The chance is there; the cause is there, the man is there. For many years he was confined in a dungeon…. One day it occurred to him to push the door of his cell.
It was open; and it had never been locked. When he would rouse their indignation, his heart is filled with anger. Before he can move their tears, his own must flow. To convince them, he must himself believe. His opinions may change as their impressions fade but every orator means what he says at that moment he says it.
He may be often inconsistent. He is never consciously insincere. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. The peculiar balance of the phrases produces a cadence which resembles blank verse rather than prose.
If I have been of any service to my fellow men, it has never been by selfrepression, but always by self-expression. A merciful Providence passes the sponge of oblivion across much that is suffered, and enables us to cherish the great moments of life and honor which come to us in the march.
No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting and so get to the bottom of the subject.
But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest and dullest colors and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colors which will delight the celestial eye.
We see reflections from hours of pleasure, hours of intense creative enjoyment, bottled sunshine, captured inspiration, perennial delight. In fact, if anything I am a prod. My difficulties rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint to wait through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved. Originally a Conservative, Churchill switched over to the Liberal party in It will not be preserved by casting aside in dangerous times the panoply of warlike strength. We cannot tell when, we cannot tell how, but we shall come through.
Human beings and human societies are not structures that are built or machines that are forged. They are plants that grow and must be treated as such. He mixed the powder with the greatest care, making sure that not only the ingredients but the proportions were absolutely correct. But the bear blew first. They hold no golden casket enshrining the treasures of centuries to be shattered irretrievably in their hands.
They expect to fall; they hope to rise again. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times. I can come to terms with her. We must be strong, we must be self-reliant.
In a complex community like our own no absolute rigid uniformity of practice is possible. Surely it is the individual effort of hard work and brains and the development of free and independent enterprise. Our civilization is built up by private property and can only be defended by private property. Households which have possessions which they prize and cherish because they are their own, or even a house and garden of their own, a little money put by for a rainy day, or an insurance policy—that is what the Conservatives mean by a property-owning democracy.
It is to be done by hard work in many spheres of action. The difficulties will argue for themselves. We can seek a period in the past whose conditions resemble as closely as possible those of our day…. Secondly, we can survey the general course of development in our immediate past and endeavor to prolong it into the near future. The first is the method of the historian; the second that of the scientist.
He must have a strong impression of a complex variety and all that it has to give and he must serve a period of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.
You think too much about these things. I always like to give trains and airplanes a fair chance of getting away. So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand and well armed, lots of enemies will give you wide berth.
The reason is that ship has a purpose. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. Gather afresh in heart and spirit all the energies of your being, bend anew together for a supreme effort.
In peace, it may well become the alternative to abundance. That would only mean the wall was shattered, the train was wrecked, and the passengers maimed. First, you have to put on the brakes…then the engine has to be put in reverse. Never submit to failure. Never give in! Never, never, never, never—in nothing great and small—large and petty—Never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.
There is nothing more tranquil than the grave. I will never stifle myself in such a moral and intellectual sepulchre. I have had an ample share of both. If I stay it is because I have the feeling that I may, through things that have happened, have an influence on what I care about above all else—the heralding of a sure and lasting peace.
After a stroke in June, Prime Minister Churchill addressed the Conservative party convention in October signaling his intention not to resign. There are no safe battles. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It is nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.
Science is ready to extend the frontiers of every country without injury to the rights of others and to increase the well-being of every people at the expense of none. On the one hand science opens up a chasm of self-destruction beyond limits.
On the other hand she displays a vision of plenty and comfort of which the masses of no race have ever known or even dreamed. He has it in his power to solve quite easily the problems of material existence. He has conquered the wild beasts and he has even conquered the insects and microbes. All is in his hand. He has to conquer his last and worst enemy—himself. My faith is in the high progressive destiny of man. I do not believe we are to be flung back into abysmal darkness by those fiercesome discoveries which human genius has made.
Let us make sure that they are servants, but not our masters. His opinions may change as their impressions fade, but every orator means what he says at the moment he says it. This state is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss. It is a more or less successful attempt to simulate these habits of mime.
Most men aspire to be good actors in a play…. Three principal influences combine to assert men in this attempt: preparation, vanity and sentiment. What is wanted is a remedy. What they want are the fruits of war. The end appears in view before it is reached.
The word anticipates the conclusion and the last words fall amid a thunder of assent. No one can absorb it. Just say one thing…. Of course, you can say the point in many different ways over and over again with different illustrations.
When you use it as a sop, you get your cheer, you get some friendly notes in the Press…. But it is a sop and it is gone. But if you use it as a lever it may be made to influence matters of far greater consequence than is measured even by the actual amount involved. His arguments in each case when contrasted can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction; yet his object will throughout have remained the same.
These often settle themselves. It is when the balance quivers and the proportions are veiled in mist that the opportunities for world-saving decisions present themselves. Then it is much easier to switch from one to the other as to when and where the cat jumps. The battle is going on in every walk and sphere of life. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed.
Yet even the military student, in his zeal to master the fascinating combinations of the actual conflict, often forgets the far more interesting complications of supply. Now it is the infantry who will have to clear a way for the tanks.
Regulations increasingly take the place of statutes. It will destroy all incentive. There is the mistake which comes through daring—what I call a mistake towards the enemy—in which you must sustain your commanders….
There are mistakes from the safety-first principle—mistakes of turning away from the enemy; and they require a far more acid consideration. I do not like to see a government supported only by bayonets.
Nazism and Communism—two peas…Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You leave out God and you substitute the Devil. You leave out love and you substitute hate. The second day you at last begin to gain your sea legs and venture tentatively to the deck. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may destroy it, but there it is.
How thin and paltry these arguments will sound if we are caught a year or two hence, fat, opulent and defenseless. It makes no difference to me what dress it wears, what slogans it mouths. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God.
Not only did they divide executive, legislative and judicial functions, but also by instituting a federal system they preserved immense and sovereign rights to local communities and by all these means they have preserved—often at some inconvenience—a system of law and liberty under which they have thrived and reached the leadership of the world.
But all will come right if we all work together to the end. He need never be inactive or bored, there is not reason for him to seek refuge in the clack and clatter of our modern life. He need not be dependent on the headlines which give him something new every day. He has the wisdom of all time to drink from, to enjoy as long as he lives.
We must learn to support ourselves, but we must also learn how to live. Votes are the means by which the poorest people in the country and all people in the country can make sure that they get their vital needs attended to.
Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world. War is rather a race of an extraordinary character which, once started, has to be run through to the end. What vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is. No more may Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon lead armies to victory, ride their horses on the field of battle sharing the perils of their soldiers and deciding the fate of empires by the resolves and gestures of a few intense hours.
For the future they will sit surrounded by clerks in offices, as safe, as quiet, and as dreary as government departments, while the fighting men in scores of thousands are slaughtered or stifled over the telephone by machinery. Looking at those shapeless forms confined in a regulation blanket, the pride of race, the pomp of Empire, the glory of war appeared but the faint unsubstantial fabric of a dream. Unless the succeeding sentence is added, it is out of context.
The statesman who yields to the war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy. It goes for so long.
The shame is that our moral and intellectual guidance should not have been exerted as our material power. It is the contrast between the vague and soothing political sentiments on the one hand and the rough practical measures which have to be taken.
To make it palatable, we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort I learned to like it. It is a good drink to draw a sword on. God bless you, darling, in the year that opens and give you happiness which fills your life. I am so devoured of egoism that I would like to have another soul in another world and meet you in another setting and pay you all the love and honor of the great romances.
He was a friend of Alexander Walker, the early head of the Scottish distillery. To begin with it is a toy, an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then a master and then a tyrant. These are the years! Let me make that clear.
I was one of the original ones after the Balfour Declaration and I have worked faithfully at it. The array of words, the cadence of line, the mounting of sentences, the crescendoing culmination can be sensed only by reading aloud the addresses as a whole. Of course, listening to his recorded addresses is even better. Churchill has a rhetorical style. Space requirements do not permit printing in full even his greatest addresses.
Churchill addressed audiences for almost seven decades. Those talks fill eight volumes, with over a thousand pages to each volume. Yet a sampling of his oratory can be offered through excerpts. This chapter presents excerpts of addresses from the would-be candidate to the retired statesman. Soon the twenty-two-year-old officer was asked to address the Primrose League in Bath. This was an auxiliary for the Conservative Party.
It promoted allegiance to the crown and empire. For weeks Churchill prepared for his speaking debut. He wanted the speech to reflect the philosophy of his father, who had died two years earlier.
The British workingman has more to hope from the rising tide of Tory Democracy than from the dried-up drain pipe of Radicalism…. There were those who said that in this Jubilee year our Empire has reached the height of its glory and we should begin to decline…. Do not believe these croakers but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing that the vigor and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen, that our flags shall fly high on the sea, our voice be heard in the councils of Europe, our sovereign be supported by the love of her subjects.
Churchill, a recent veteran of the Boer War, chose the British African colony situation as the subject for his maiden address. He would close this February speech to the House of Commons with a reference to his late father, who had served with many of the House of Commons members who were present.
I cannot sit down without saying how grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me and which has been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account but because of a certain splendid memory which many honourable members still preserve.
In an October speech to a Liberal Party audience in Scotland, Churchill delivered a thoughtful address contrasting Liberalism with Socialism.
We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition downwards. We do not want to pull down the structure of science and civilization but to spread a net on the abyss. To an Anglo-American audience in London in July, Churchill delivered his answer to those who called for a negotiated truce.
No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong. Today we can have the greatest failure or the greatest triumph—as we choose. There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother. Never, never did science offer such fairy gifts to man. Never did their knowledge and science stand so high. Repair the waste. Rebuild the ruins. Heal the wounds. Crown the victors. Comfort the broken and broken-hearted. There is the battle we have won to fight.
There is the victory we have now to win. Let us go forward together. Do not delude yourselves. This is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons and when they have them believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories or colonies.
So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps until, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet wears. A little further there are only flagstones and a little further on still, these break beneath your feet…. Now is the time at last to rouse the nation.
Perhaps it is the last The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill time it can be roused with a chance of preventing war, or with a chance of coming through with victory should our effort to prevent war fail. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of the bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
In January , Churchill would close his speech about the naval war in the North Atlantic with short verbal phrases sublime in their simplicity. It was a foretaste of his later rhetoric as prime minister. Fill the armies, rule the air, pour out the munitions, strangle the U-boats, sweep the mines, plough the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succour the wounded, uplift the downcast and honour the brave.
Let us go forward together in all parts of the Empire, in all parts of the Island. There is not a week, nor a day, nor an hour to lose. Churchill, although not the first choice of the leaders of the Conservative party, was, however, the only Conservative whom the Labor and Liberal party leaders would accept as prime minister.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I answer in one word: 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. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. It is also beyond doubt the most sublime. Side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great Dominions and by the wide Empires which rest beneath their shield—side by side, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.
Behind them—behind us—behind the armies and fleets of Britain and France—gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races; the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.
Today is Trinity Sunday. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be. Members—many with tears in their eyes—stood pounding the benches in front of them when Churchill delivered his defiant words. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. It was an address to rally Londoners as they were being subjected to nightly bombings while they awaited the expected German invasion from across the Channel. Perhaps it will come tonight.
Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or what is perhaps a harder test a protracted vigil.
But be the ordeal sharp, or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley. We may show mercy—we shall ask for none…. This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition. It is a war of people and of causes. There are vast numbers not only on this island, but in every land who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill will never be recorded.
This is a war of the unknown warriors; but let us strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will ever be lifted from our age. Churchill would turn the bleakness of challenge into exhilaration. In his closing sentences, he borrowed from the St. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
No one can predict, no one can even imagine, how this terrible war against German and Nazi aggression will run its course or how far it will spread or how long it will last.
Long, dark months of trials and tribulations lie before us. Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. Our qualities and deeds must burn and glow through the gloom of Europe until they become the veritable beacon of its salvation.
In a speech to the House, Churchill paid tribute to the gallant courage of the airmen, employing a phrase he had earlier voiced to the Vice Air Marshall at the time of the German retreat. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. Never will I believe that her place among the greatest nations of the world has been lost forever….
Remember, we shall never stop, never weary, and never give in, and that our whole people and Empire have vowed themselves to the task of cleansing Europe from the Nazi pestilence and saving the world from the new Dark Ages…. We seek to beat the life and soul out of Hitler and Hitlerism, that alone, that all the time, that to the end.
The speech was a direct appeal by Britain to the still neutral United States for military support. In his closing peroration, Churchill refers to a poem which Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president, had delivered to Churchill from President Roosevelt. Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
What is the answer that I shall give, in your name, to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of ,,? Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessings and, under Providence, all will be well.
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.
He ended with a poem by Arthur Clough that alludes to some victorious progress in the eastern theater of war and then points to the increasing involvement of the U. Nothing that is happening now is comparable in gravity with the dangers through which we passed last year.
Nothing that can happen in the East is comparable with what is happening in the West. Last time I spoke to you I quoted the lines of Longfellow which President Roosevelt had written out for me in his own hand. I have some other lines which are less well known but which seem apt and appropriate to our fortunes tonight, and I believe they will be so judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies: For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright. He immediately called the BBC to schedule a broadcast from Chequers the following evening. He stayed up most of the night preparing the address. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.
From this nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley. We will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land. 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. The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. In this book you will find the best ripe plums of humour taken from Churchill's many gems of wit.
Charismatic, erudite, and often controversial, Winston Churchill was one of the most inspiring leaders of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest wits. His much-celebrated sense of fun and mischief has led to many of his jokes and ripostes becoming almost as well known as his famous wartime speeches.
This inspiring collection gathers together Winston Churchill's wisest and wittiest quotations and is sure to delight all admirers of this great British statesman's rousing and compelling way with words. Get A Churchill Reader Books now! Winston Churchill is without doubt one of the best known names in British history. Notable for his revered leadership qualities, Churchill was also a much-quoted figure.
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