Top 50 Andrew Roberts Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.” ’ Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962.”

— Andrew Roberts

2. “Revenge may be sweet, but it is also most expensive.”

— Andrew Roberts

3. “I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire,’ proclaimed Churchill defending the partisanship of the British Gazette in a Commons debate on the Strike on 7 July. ‘When you are in a great difficulty and in a fight of this kind, however unfortunate it may be, it is absolutely no use people pretending they do not know what side they are on.”

— Andrew Roberts

4. “If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords,’ he said. ‘It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.”

— Andrew Roberts

5. “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,” he once said. “When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.”

— Andrew Roberts

6. “Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which tamely surrendered were finished.”

— Andrew Roberts

7. “Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.”

— Andrew Roberts

8. “The future is a matter of contempt for those with courage. – Napoleon Bonaparte.”

— Andrew Roberts

9. “This was a time when it was equally good to live or die. Churchill, Their Finest Hour.”

— Andrew Roberts

10. “What finally scuppered Napoleon’s Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler’s Europe.”

— Andrew Roberts

11. “If you would make war,′ he would say to to General d’Hedouville in December 1799, ’wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.”

— Andrew Roberts

12. “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October. ‘The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

— Andrew Roberts

13. “Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.”

— Andrew Roberts

14. “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,’ she told him, ’and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”

— Andrew Roberts

15. “More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.”

— Andrew Roberts

16. “We owe to the Jews,’ wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, ’a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.”

— Andrew Roberts

17. “It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.”

— Andrew Roberts

18. “I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon.”

— Andrew Roberts

19. “As one Finn put it after the battle of Kuhmo, ‘There were more Russians than we had bullets.”

— Andrew Roberts

20. “I am arrogant,’ he once said of himself in a perceptive piece of self-analysis, ’but not conceited.”

— Andrew Roberts

21. “His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ’lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’24.”

— Andrew Roberts

22. “With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.”

— Andrew Roberts

23. “Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other’s throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.”

— Andrew Roberts

24. “Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,’ he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, ’but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.”

— Andrew Roberts

25. “He appealed to the pride of those he would conquer but gave them no doubt as to the consequences of resistance. ‘The French army loves and respects all peoples, especially the simple and virtuous inhabitants of the mountains,’ read a proclamation to the Tyrolese that month. ‘But should you ignore your own interests and take up arms, we shall be terrible as the fire from heaven.”

— Andrew Roberts

26. “When you make some great mistake,’ he philosophized, ’it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”

— Andrew Roberts

27. “In the Second World War his bulldog obstinacy proved invaluable; during the Gallipoli campaign it left him appallingly vulnerable.”

— Andrew Roberts

28. “The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.”

— Andrew Roberts

29. “In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable. Churchill.”

— Andrew Roberts

30. “His high, uplifting oratory during the Second World War was clearly prefigured more than thirty years earlier.”

— Andrew Roberts

31. “Churchill loathed Communism because of the attack it made ‘on the human spirit and human rights’, he said in July 1920. ‘My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.”

— Andrew Roberts

32. “Only one thing in history is certain: that Mankind is unteachable.”

— Andrew Roberts

33. “Continuing high unemployment, the legacy of the General Strike and the Trade Disputes Act, and a long period in power had weakened the Baldwin Government, for which Churchill had some responsibility. Yet once more he was fortunate in his defeat: he would not have wanted to be chancellor of the Exchequer during the Wall Street Crash later that year.”

— Andrew Roberts

34. “This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged safe by conventional standards.”

— Andrew Roberts

35. “The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,’ he later wrote in The World Crisis; ’the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’45.”

— Andrew Roberts

36. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

— Andrew Roberts

37. “I realized that I must be on my best behaviour,’ as he later put it, ’punctual, subdued, reserved; in short, display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.”

— Andrew Roberts

38. “This is no time for ease and comfort,’ he said in reference to the extension of rationing. ‘It is the time to dare and endure.”

— Andrew Roberts

39. “His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.”

— Andrew Roberts

40. “Yet in all the anxiety of these days Churchill never lost his sense of humour. When an MP asked him on 8 June to ensure that the same mistakes over reparations were not made after victory that had been made after the Great War, the Prime Minister assured him that ‘That is most fully in our minds. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated. We shall probably make another set of mistakes.”

— Andrew Roberts

41. “Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft. Churchill.”

— Andrew Roberts

42. “The most important was not to threaten to resign unless one is prepared to go into the wilderness. If one is not so prepared, then only threaten to resign along with several other people capable of bringing down the Government.”

— Andrew Roberts

43. “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

— Andrew Roberts

44. “The prize seemed worth the possible cost.”

— Andrew Roberts

45. “If an English writer cannot say what he has to say in English, and in simple English, depend upon it, it is probably not worth saying.”

— Andrew Roberts

46. “He had that ruthless side without which great affairs cannot be handled.”

— Andrew Roberts

47. “What is money made for except to spend?”

— Andrew Roberts

48. “Nothing is lost while courage remains.”

— Andrew Roberts

49. “When asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.”

— Andrew Roberts

50. “There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

— Andrew Roberts