Category: Quotations

Churchill on Jargon: “Let Us Have an End to This Grimace”

Churchill on Jargon: “Let Us Have an End to This Grimace”

Churchill said, “Short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.” How would that peerless practitioner of English, would react to the kind of language around us today? We can imagine what he would think about substituting fashionable jargon like “challenges” for “handicaps” or “issues” for “difficulties.” What would he make of that stand-by cliché “reaching out”? Oh dear....

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Churchill Quips: God, Santayana, Musso & Not Getting Scuppered

Churchill Quips: God, Santayana, Musso & Not Getting Scuppered

The story goes that in the middle of the Second World War, Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys told WSC that “Hitler and Mussolini have an even greater burden to bear, because everything is going wrong for them.” Supposedly Churchill said in reply: Ah, but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law! I will not dignify that with quotation marks because it is nothing Churchill said. Not even about Vic Oliver, a son-in-law he really disliked. What worried Churchill was what might happen "if God wearied of mankind."

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Re-Rat Awards 2009 to Senators Gregg Arlen Specter

Re-Rat Awards 2009 to Senators Gregg Arlen Specter

On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”  He was prescient. Re-Ratting is a lost art.

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Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took As Good As He Gave

Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took As Good As He Gave

Not all were pleasant ribbing: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.... [His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…while dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.” —Nye Bevan

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Churchillisms: Puddings Without a Theme

Churchillisms: Puddings Without a Theme

"[We are] passing through a period of eclipse which may well be converted into a period of decline. There is anxiety abroad, and can we wonder at it! Why should the Government complain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for…. They have no theme [and] have deluded the masses of their supporters in the country into believing they are about to bring into being some vast, splendid, new world." —WSC

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Coming: New Churchill Phrase Index in My Next Quotebook

Coming: New Churchill Phrase Index in My Next Quotebook

Coming from Hillsdale College Press, the new edition will carry a brand new title in keeping with its far larger content. Earlier editions contained 3500 quotations; they now total over 5000. Many new ones derive from The Churchill Documents, 1942 to 1965, also published by Hillsdale. The preliminary proofs total 736 pages, but that's without the indexes. These are being compiled by the award-winning lecturer Do Mi Stauber. 

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D-Day+80: National Celebrations, Eighty Years On

D-Day+80: National Celebrations, Eighty Years On

And so on 6 June 1944 we launched the great crusade, as Eisenhower put it (today perhaps politically incorrectly). Western civilization was saved. Yet it was not, William F. Buckley Jr. argued, “the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster....It is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name….The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy."

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Marlborough Drift: The Dallying Duke

Marlborough Drift: The Dallying Duke

John Churchill (not yet a Duke) "was hidden in the cupboard of Barbara Palmer (not yet a Duchess). After having prowled about the chamber the King, much upset, asked for sweets and liqueurs. His mistress declared that the key of the cupboard was lost. The King replied that he would break down the door.On this she opened the door, and fell on her knees on one side while Churchill, discovered, knelt on the other...."

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Churchill in Manchester: Clem in the Gents, Huns at Your Throat

Churchill in Manchester: Clem in the Gents, Huns at Your Throat

William Manchester offered two famous Churchill jibes, one original, the other borrowed. David Pitblado reliably confirmed Churchill's famous crack to Clement Attlee in the Gents Loo in the House of Commons. Churchill himself admitted that somebody else first said "The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat."

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Myths of Dear Benito: Churchill’s Alleged Mussolini Complex

Myths of Dear Benito: Churchill’s Alleged Mussolini Complex

Churchill agreed to defer Italian war debt payments until 1930. Mussolini sent “the warmest expressions of gratitude” and offered him a decoration. Er, no, said WSC. (Imagine if that was among Churchill’s medals.) But Churchill's diplomatic boilerplate in Rome has been used to brand him as a fascist. In context, he referred to the Italians, not the British. And you tend to say polite things about a foreign leader when he has promised to pay back a lot of money.  

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