Winston Churchill Quotes

639 Sourced Quotes

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

Winston Churchill
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Sometimes misquoted as "We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us."

Winston Churchill
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Winston Churchill
Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it... And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue - out of charity and out of chivalry... - and said, "Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people."

Winston Churchill
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Winston Churchill
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other. Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.

Winston Churchill
My ability to persuade my wife to marry me [was] quite my most brilliant achievement … Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one's better half.

Winston Churchill
Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy – and why try to stuff in those who are not? – and knowledge and thought would open the 'magic casements' of the mind.

Winston Churchill
India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.

Winston Churchill
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

Winston Churchill
We are plunged in a long and grievous struggle. But all will come right if we all work together to the end.

Winston Churchill
It becomes still more difficult to reconcile Japanese action with prudence or even with sanity. What kind of a people do they think we are?

Winston Churchill
The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilization.

Winston Churchill
The people of Asia were slaves, because they had not learned how to pronounce the word 'no'.

Winston Churchill
One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

Winston Churchill
Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage

Winston Churchill
Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British Pharmacopaeia.

Winston Churchill
There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.

Winston Churchill
Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.

Winston Churchill
Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

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

Winston Churchill
With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century

Winston Churchill
It is not open to the cool bystander... to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which would never have occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time.

Winston Churchill
On qualities of Herbert Asquith and Arthur Balfour:
The difference between him and Arthur is that Arthur is wicked and moral, Asquith is good and immoral.

Winston Churchill
In the twinkling of an eye I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.
Of the General Election of 1922

Winston Churchill