Quotations Archives - Page 3 of 31 - Richard M. Langworth

Winston Churchill’s Tests of Freedom: Then and Now

10 January 2024 Comments 0 Comments

"These simple, practical tests, are some of the title-deeds on which a new Italy could be founded." Think of the years of experience, thought, and hard political lessons that went into those basic tenets. How Churchill expressed them in only 201 words, mostly of one or two syllables. How little they are thought of today, when we try to describe certain nations as free countries.

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Churchill and the Rhineland: “Terrible Circumstances”

5 January 2024 Comments 2 Comments

Churchill would have backed French reoccupation of the Rhineland, but he soon gathered that the League of Nations was toothless. Churchill’s theme did not dramatically change in 1936; it merely evolved. As early as 1933 he had declared: "Whatever way we turn there is risk. But the least risk and the greatest help will be found in re-creating the Concert of Europe." The failure of a concerted response over the Rhineland was to be repeated. Each time western statesmen hoped the latest Hitler inroad would be his last.

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Today — Churchill at Harvard, 6 September 1943, with President James Conant. (Imperial War Museum, public domain)

Conant, Churchill, and the Harvard of 1943

15 December 2023 Comments 0 Comments

James Conant was a liberal. He favored admitting women and minorities, and ultimately Harvard did. I don't think he welcomed anti-Semites, although undoubtedly they existed on his campus. He was, above all, devoted to the free exchange of ideas. "Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that are said," as Churchill once remarked. "But on the whole we would rather lump them than do away with it."

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2012 Benghazi Consulate: “Sometimes History Rhymes”

5 December 2023 Comments 0 Comments

"The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world.... Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected. It is very sad, but we had all better recognise it. At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared." —WSC

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Bevan in more jovial form at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, near Manchester, on the first day of the National Health Service, 5 July 1948. (University of Liverpool, Creative Commons)

Trump’s “Vermin” Crack: Nothing New Except the Reaction

25 November 2023 Comments 2 Comments

"We speak of the Minister of Health, but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease? For is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, moral disease, and indeed a highly infectious form? Indeed, I can think of no better step to signalize the inauguration of the National Health Service than that a person who so obviously needs psychiatrical attention should be among the first of its patients." —Churchill on Bevan, 1948

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Irving Berlin, Isaiah Berlin: Churchill’s Mistaken Identity

20 November 2023 Comments 0 Comments

Enthralled by his accounts of American politics from the British Embassy in Washington, Churchill invited a "Mr. I. Berlin" to lunch. The invitee turned out to be Irving Berlin, not Isaiah, which produced a confusing dialogue around the table. ("Tell me, Mr. Berlin, what is your greatest work?" ... "White Christmas.") Later, meeting the real Isaiah Berlin, WSC acknowledged "the grave solipsism I was so unfortunate to have perpetrated."

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Churchill’s Shakespeare: Quoting “Romeo and Juliet”

15 November 2023 Comments 0 Comments

Darrell Holley offers one citation from "Romeo and Juliet." In his biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston writes: “Would he, under the many riddles the future had reserved for such as he, snapped the tie of sentiment that bound him to his party, resolved at last to ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars’….?” As so often in that better-read age, Churchill didn’t bother to cite the source, assuming most of his readers would know the source.

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Winston Churchill and Thucydides

10 November 2023 Comments 0 Comments

"Open no more negotiations with Sparta. Show them plainly that you are not crushed by your present afflictions. They who face calamity without wincing, and who offer the most energetic resistance, these, be they States or individuals, are the truest heroes." —Lord Beaverbrook's advice to Churchill, quoting Thucydides, 1942.

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“The World’s Great Stories” Retold by Winston Churchill

5 November 2023 Comments 0 Comments

Why would Churchill wish to retell such classics as "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Don Quixote," or "A Tale of Two Cities"? Because he was paid well to do so. Never independently wealthy, he worked hard to maintain his luxurious lifestyle—and the heavy entertainment and travel overhead of an active political career. “I earned my livelihood by dictating articles which had a wide circulation not only in Great Britain and the United States,” he wrote, “but also, before Hitler's shadow fell upon them, in the most famous newspapers of 16 European countries. I lived in fact from mouth to hand.”

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Cars & Churchill: Blood, Sweat & Gears (3): Humber…

25 October 2023 Comments 2 Comments

Churchill’s staff remembered the sense of urgency so characteristic of the man. In the old Humber, “Murray, the detective, would sit at [the chauffeur’s] side, quietly murmuring, ‘slow down here’ or ‘pull in to the left a little more,’” wrote Roy Howells, a male nurse. “At the back Sir Winston would be…tapping on the glass partition and calling out, ‘Go on!’ Whenever he felt Bullock was slow in overtaking he would lean forward and bellow, ‘Now!’ It does Bullock great credit that he never really took the chances his passenger would have liked….”

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