Ralph Keyes Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Origins of a Famous Phrase

30 April 2018 Comments 0 Comments

Though he gave permanent life to blood, toil, tears and sweat, Churchill’s best-remembered words did not originate with him. Similar expressions date very far back. (Excerpted from my essay for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read the full article, click here.)

Quotations scholar Ralph Keyes writes:

Cicero and Livy wrote of “sweat and blood.” A 1611 John Donne poem included the lines “That ‘tis in vaine to dew, or mollifie / It with thy Teares, or Sweat, or Bloud.” More than two centuries later, Byron wrote, “Year after year they voted cent per cent / Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions—why?—for…

Churchill on Horses

5 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

“We need a horseman for our next president,” writes Gary Hodgson in the Fort Morgan Times, who then goes on to quote “the famous reining champion, team roper and all around cowboy…Sir Winston Churchill,” who allegedly said: “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

Unless Mr. Hodgson has found a new attribution, that charmer is not Churchill’s. It’s listed in the “Red Herrings” appendix in Churchill by Himself, page 575, with this note:

Repeatedly attributed to everyone from Woodrow Wilson’s physician to Ronald Reagan. “Clergyman Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) is one person to whom the thought was attributed in his time.…