Winston Churchill Quotes

639 Sourced Quotes

The tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts.

Winston Churchill
When the mouse is away the cats might play.
About whether Attlee would go to America about the financial crisis

Winston Churchill
You are a small exclamation mark at the end of a very long and insignificant sentence in the book of history.

Winston Churchill
It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.

Winston Churchill
[America] is a very great country, my dear Jack, not pretty or romantic but great and utilitarian.

Winston Churchill
It is in the interest of the wage-earner to have many other alternatives open to him than service under one all-powerful employer called the State

Winston Churchill
In my experience of large enterprises, I have found it is often a mistake to try to settle everything at once.

Winston Churchill
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Winston Churchill
Our free trade plan is quite simple. We say that every [citizen] shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he wants, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state.

Winston Churchill
When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.

Winston Churchill
The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities.

Winston Churchill
Building slow destroyers ! One might as well breed slow race horses.

Winston Churchill
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, and timid policies offer a path to safety.

Winston Churchill
If you travel the earth, you will find it is largely divided into two classes of people-people who say 'I wonder why such and such is not done" and people who say "Now who is going to prevent me from doing that thing?"

Winston Churchill
A hopeful disposition is not the sole qualification to be a prophet.

Winston Churchill
Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

Winston Churchill
Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out.

Winston Churchill
Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!

Winston Churchill
Hasty work and premature decisions may lead to penalties out of all proportion to the issues immediately involved.

Winston Churchill
Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear - I fear greatly - the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, even more loudly, even more widely.

Winston Churchill
The soul of freedom is deathless; it cannot, and will not perish.

Winston Churchill
Every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.

Winston Churchill
It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken.

Winston Churchill
You cannot ask us to take sides against arithmetic.

Winston Churchill
There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans, and no people who, once estranged, are more difficult to win back.

Winston Churchill
The Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be.

Winston Churchill
If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance there would be no limit to the happiness, the prosperity, and the glory which its 300,000,000 or 400,000,000 people would enjoy.

Winston Churchill
Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts.... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.

Winston Churchill
Now that we are, as you say, 'in the same boat,' would it not be wise for us to have another conference... and the sooner the better.

Winston Churchill
The dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within.

Winston Churchill