August 10, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 15

Wit & Wisdom

One-Liners (Part II)

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

The Churchill Centre website carries a header with a Churchill quotation which rotates regularly. Given space limitations, the quotations must be brief and pithy. Using our quotations database for the editor’s next book, Winston Churchill by Himself, we strove to find brief quotations for this place on our site. We found so many that we thought readers would be interested. Further quotations will be published and your own are most welcome.

Last time it was pointed out that if we are going to publish one-liners they should fall on one line. There is (almost) nothing you cannot do with a computer…

“Honours should go where death and danger go.” —1916

“God for a month of power and a good shorthand writer!” —1916

“The First Sea Lord moves the fleet. No one else moves it.” —1917

“Bolshevism is a great evil…arisen out of great social evils.” —1919

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.” —1921

“You must look at facts because they look at you.” —1925

“…a prospective surplus is always a milestone in a budget.” —1925

“Time and money are largely interchangeable terms.” —1926

“He spoke without a note, and almost without a point.” —1931 (about William Graham MP)

“It is not in our power to anticipate our destiny.” —1932

“France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core.” —1932

“War is very cruel. It goes on for so long.” —1937

“All wisdom is not new wisdom.” —1938

“Never…was so much owed by so many to so few.” —1940

“It is the time to dare and endure.” —1940

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” —1941

“If we win, nobody will care. If we lose, there will be nobody to care.” —1941

“We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.” —1942

“We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another.” —1943

“You cannot cure cancer by a majority.” —1946

“Craft is common both to skill and deceit.” —1947

“One ought to be just before one is generous.” —1947

“Vengeance is the most costly and dissipating of luxuries.” —1948

“The English never draw a line without blurring it.” —1948

“If you destroy a free market you create a black market.” —1949

“Nationalization of industry is the doom of trade unionism.” —1950

“Evils can be created much quicker than they can be cured.” —1951

“It is no part of my case that I am always right.” —1952

“I never take pleasure in human woe.” —1953

“Envisage—an unpleasant and overworked word.” —1953

“Dull, Duller, Dulles.” —1953 (of John Foster Dulles)

“Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” —1954*

*Sir Martin Gilbert, speaking of this remark (made during Churchill’s visit to Washington in June 1954) stated: “Those were Churchill’s actual words. Four years later, during a visit to Australia, Harold Macmillan spoke the version usually—and wrongly—attributed to Churchill: ‘Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.’”