Quotations Archives - Page 31 of 31

“Winston” Olbermann and the Healthcare Debate

19 October 2009

N.B.: If Mr. Olbermann had done more research, he would know what Churchill did say about national healthcare, which is more to the point: see Churchill and Healthcare.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies.…

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Did Churchill Praise Hitler?

25 June 2009

"I am surprised that the head of a great State should set himself to attack British members of Parliament who hold no official position and who are not even the leaders of parties. Such action on his part can only enhance any influence they may have, because their fellow-countrymen have long been able to form their own opinion about them and really do not need foreign guidance." —WSC, 1938

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Quotations Winston Churchill Never Said: A Few Additions

19 June 2009

A website named “IL Conservative” posted in June 2009 eight Churchill “quotations,” six of which he never said. These quotations are all over the Internet, none of them attributed to WSC. They just seem to multiply and get passed on, like the common cold. They are all examples of “Churchillian Drift” (or “Yogi Berra Drift,” if you are a baseball fan): neat little sayings attached to somebody famous to make them sound more interesting.

The purpose of my “Red Herrings” appendix of eighty incorrect quotations in Churchill by Himself is to counteract the raft of misinformation conveyed, largely through the web, but it’s like the Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke.…

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Poison gas cylinders released in World War I (Wikipedia Commons)

Bill O’Reilly, Winston Churchill and “Poison Gas”

11 May 2009

Churchill was right when he wrote that this particular “poison gas” is one from which “nearly everyone recovers.” Of 164,612 British mustard gas casualties on the Western front, only 4,086 or 2.5% died. Chlorine in its later "perfected stage" killed nearly 20%.

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Torture, Obama and Winston Churchill: Get it right

30 April 2009

While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation, including paraphrases and key sections of it, are unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured.

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Churchill, Mein Kampf and the Koran

25 February 2009

"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 of the world.Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." —WSC

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