Winston Churchill War Quotations

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

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.

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

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.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

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

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

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

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

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.

But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?

Those good at war aren't good at peace, and those good at peace aren't good at war.

We must learn from misfortune the means of future strength.

Before America entered the war [WW2] I knew we could not win it, but after she entered I knew we could not lose

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.

We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.

Some people did not like this ceremonious style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. [Churchill ended his December 8, 1941 letter to the Japanese Ambassador, declaring that a state of war now existed between the United Kingdom and Japan, with the courtly flourish "I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant".]

There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is far worse or much harder to win.

War is horrible, but slavery is worse.

You know, in war, you don't have to be nice. You only have to be right.

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.

My ability to persuade my wife to marry me [was] quite my most brilliant achievement ... Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one's better half.

The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black.

Don't be careless about yourselves--on the other hand not too careful. Live well but do not flaunt it. Laugh a little and teach your men to laugh--get good humor under fire--war is a game that's played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Now at last the slowly gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us. Four or five millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept.

All was there-the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.

England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.

...Have the stresses of war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?

The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

...every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.

We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.

God for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.

How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.

My only consolation for the failure of the Dardanelles was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war, and that therefore He had interfered with a project that would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion.

There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.

I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong...not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

The old wars were decided by their episodes rather than by their tendencies. In this war, the tendencies are far more important than the episodes.

There is the solution which I respectfully offer to you in this Address to which I have given the title "The Sinews of Peace."

...the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come.

In war, the truth must be guarded by a body guard of lies.

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.

In war, truth is often the first casualty.

Unless we establish some form of world government, it will not be possible for us to avert a World War III in the future.

Unless some effective world supergovernment for the purpose of preventing war can be set up ... the prospects for peace and human progress are dark ....If .... it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all men enjoy and share.

You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.

Before the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end.

The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement.

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. Therefore our supreme effort must be to gain overwhelming mastery in the Air. The Fighters are our salvation . . . but the Bombers alone provide the means of victory. . . . In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany.

. . . when I look round to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path . . . and that is absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through.

May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past.

History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .

We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling ones pulse and taking ones temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.

I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!

Thus, then, on the night of the tenth of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny.

Indeed I do not think we should be justified in using any but the more sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire, and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.

War, which used to be cruel and magnificent has now become cruel and squalid.

The tank was originally invented to clear a way for the infantry in the teeth of machine-gun fire. Now it is the infantry who will have to clear a way for the tanks.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

If, however, there is to be a war of nerves let us make sure our nerves are strong and are fortified by the deepest convictions of our hearts.

There is no working middle course in wartime.

We have taken a grave and hazardous decision to sustain the Greeks and try to make a Balkan Front.

The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilization.

The whole of northern Norway was covered with snow to depths which none of our soldiers had ever seen, felt, or imagined. There were neither snow-shoes nor skis - still less skiers. We must do our best. Thus began this ramshackle campaign.

The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.

In Hitler's launching of the Nazi campaign on Russia, we can already see, after six months of fighting, that he has made one of the outstanding blunders in history.

We must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations

Without ships, we cannot live.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe...All these famous cities...lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Singapore could only be taken after a siege by an army of at least 50,000 men. It is not considered possible that the Japanese would embark on such a mad enterprise.

Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.

The statesman who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

Science unfolded her treasures and her secrets to the desperate demands of men, and placed in their hands agencies and apparatus almost decisive in their character. Reflecting on the outcome of World War I, and an ominous future.

May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings-nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.

In time of war, soldiers, however sensible, care a great deal more on some occasions about slaking their thirst than about the danger of enteric fever. Better known as typhoid, the disease is often spread by drinking contaminated water.

The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.

What is our policy? ... to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors

In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnaminity In Peace: Good Will.

Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.