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by Winston Churchill
144 sayings of Winston Churchill, organized into ten themes - the Body Politic, Life and Living, Dealing with People, Power and Authority, and the rest. A new one each visit.
tags: churchill, winston churchill, wwii, westminster, british, speeches, wartime, wit, statesman, nobel
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
- House of Commons, 13 May 1940
This archive collects 144 quotations of Winston Churchill drawn from Max Morris’s Quotable Churchill (Summersdale, 2014), arranged in the ten themes Morris chose: the off-stage Churchill - the dinner-table aphorist, the parliamentary needler, the man who could end an argument with a sentence. Most of the great speeches need to be heard, not read. What survives well on the page is the wit, the malice, and the stubborn good humour.
A new quotation loads each time you open this page. Press ↻ DRAW for another. Filter by theme below, or search any phrase.
A new Churchill loads each visit. Press ↻ DRAW for another. Filter by theme below, or search any phrase - try blood, history, cigar, democracy.
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“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
- House of Commons, 20 August 1940
PRIME MINISTER · HISTORIAN · PAINTER · NOBEL LAUREATE 1953
Born at Blenheim Palace on 30 November 1874, the unwanted son of a brilliant father and an American mother, Churchill spent the next ninety years arguing his way into and out of nearly every public position the British state had to offer. He charged with cavalry at Omdurman, escaped a Boer prison, ran the Admiralty into the catastrophe of Gallipoli, lost his cabinet seat, won it back, lost it again, painted, wrote four million words of history, was forecast to die in obscurity at sixty - and at sixty-five became Prime Minister at the worst hour of British history.
What survives in this archive is not the speeches - those need to be heard, not read - but the off-stage Churchill: the dinner-table aphorist, the parliamentary needler, the man who could end an argument with a sentence. The 144 quotations below are taken from Quotable Churchill, edited by Max Morris (Summersdale, 2014), and are organized into the ten themes Morris chose: the Body Politic, Life and Living, Dealing with People, Power and Authority, Patriotism, Toil and Trouble, Education, Language and Communication, Pastimes, and Philosophical Thoughts.
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
House of Commons, 13 May 1940.
This collection follows Quotable Churchill, edited by Max Morris (Summersdale Publishers, 2014, ISBN 978-1-84953-639-2), reproduced here in the order of its ten chapters. Where Morris included a context line - On Ramsay MacDonald, On the qualities a politician requires, On starting school - it’s preserved beneath the quotation as he printed it. The book is 144 sayings; this archive is the same 144, fully searchable.
For the speeches themselves and the long history that frames them, the standard reference remains Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life (Heinemann, 1991) and the eight-volume official biography. For the wartime broadcasts, the Cassell three-volume War Speeches (1951–52) is the source. Both are out of scope for this archive, which is a bedside-companion volume - the Churchill you can hold in your hand on a quiet evening, not the Churchill of the newsreels.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
- Lord Mayor’s Day Luncheon, Mansion House, 10 November 1942
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill · 30 November 1874 - 24 January 1965 · 90 years, 1 month, 25 days. State funeral at St Paul’s; buried at Bladon, beside his parents, in sight of Blenheim Palace.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI