Winston Churchill Political Quotations

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

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.

After a time, civil servants tend to become no longer servants and no longer civil.

Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.

For with primacy in power is also joined an awe inspiring accountability to the future.

At the depths of that dusty soul there is nothing but abject surrender.

Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.

There is no surer method of economizing and saving money than in the reduction of the number of officials.

If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future.

A world united is better than a world divided, but a world divided is better than a world destroyed.

They [the Labour Party] are not fit to manage a whelk stall.

Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

Neville Chamberlain looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.

An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters.

Immense deposits of kimmeridge clay, containing the oil-bearing bands or seams, stretch across England from Dorsetshire to Lincolnshire. [An early political recognition of the native resource. The Geological Survey had identified the inflammable oil shale in reports since at least 1888.]

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.