Winston Churchill Quotes (492 Quotes)

The poor girl does not know how to have a conversation. Unfortunately, she does know how to speak.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

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.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

I live from mouth to hand.

It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

The German dictator, instead of snatching the victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverest boys . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence - which is a noble thing.

I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle

The crafty, cold-blooded, blackhearted Italian.

Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance.

I am bored with it all.

The Americans will always do the right thing ... after they've exhausted all the alternatives.

On the outcome of World War II It was the nation and the race dwelling all 'round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the lion's roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right place to use his claws.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.

If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.

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.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

It is a socialist ideal that making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.

Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.

Experts should be on tap but never on top.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

Saving is a fine thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you.

Adlai Stevenson, himself a notable speaker, often reminisced about his last meeting with Churchill. I asked him on whom or what he had based his oratorical style. Churchill replied, 'It was an American statesman who inspired me and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ.' Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockrans speeches of 60 years before. 'He was my model,' Churchill said. 'I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.'

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

We must just KBO ('Keep Buggering On').

One voyage to India is enough the others are merely repletion.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Everybody has a right to pronounce foreign names as he chooses.

I don't see why not, young man. You look reasonably fit to me.

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison, ... without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths. We have little control over the future and none at all over the past.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

It is all right to rat, but you can't re-rat.