Winston Churchill Quotes

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

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

We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.
Winston Churchill

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
Winston Churchill

I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even play, from eight o’clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.
Winston Churchill

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
Winston Churchill

I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk – and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.
Winston Churchill



Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Winston Churchill

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

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Winston Churchill


History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
Winston Churchill


The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston Churchill

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
Winston Churchill

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
Winston Churchill

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


The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill

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

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
Winston Churchill

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.
Winston Churchill

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Winston Churchill

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”
Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”
Winston Churchill

Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”
Winston Churchill

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Winston Churchill

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. 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 fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill


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

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.
Winston Churchill

Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill

If you are going to go through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
Winston Churchill

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Winston Churchill

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Winston Churchill

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.
Winston Churchill

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
Winston Churchill

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.
Winston Churchill

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill


We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill

There is no such thing as a good tax.
Winston Churchill

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill