Top 50 William Manchester Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. – JOHN F. KENNEDY on Theodore Roosevelt New York City, December 5, 1961.”

— William Manchester

2. “I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, “Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?” And if it’s not, then I rewrite it.”

— William Manchester

3. “Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams – but it never builds.”

— William Manchester

4. “Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.”

— William Manchester

6. “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

— William Manchester

7. “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Then, after calling.”

— William Manchester

8. “The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.”

— William Manchester

9. “The sum of a million facts is not the truth.”

— William Manchester

10. “Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But” – his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear – “your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby.”

— William Manchester

11. “To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.”

— William Manchester

12. “In Churchill’s moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees.”

— William Manchester

13. “An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.”

— William Manchester

14. “But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.”

— William Manchester

15. “Inside his second-rate mind, one felt, a third-rate mind was struggling toward the surface.”

— William Manchester

16. “The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.”

— William Manchester

17. “I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy.”

— William Manchester

18. “A man’s task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn’t much matter what else he finds.”

— William Manchester

19. “I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.”

— William Manchester

20. “The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort.”

— William Manchester

21. “Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might.”

— William Manchester

22. “The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.”

— William Manchester

23. “They were following their prime minister, matching their government’s mood.”

— William Manchester

24. “Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a forgotten ember, still smoldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red.”

— William Manchester

25. “The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.”

— William Manchester

26. “GBS wired Winston: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend – if you have one.” Churchill wired back: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second – if there is one.”61.”

— William Manchester

27. “Research, of course, is no substitute for wisdom. The sum of a million facts is not the truth.”

— William Manchester

28. “And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, “This is nonsense up with which I will not put.”

— William Manchester

29. “I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start – an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.”

— William Manchester

30. “Later he would say that writing a book “is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

— William Manchester

31. “A man is all the people he has been. Some recollections never die. They lie in one’s subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.”

— William Manchester

32. “One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society.”

— William Manchester

33. “All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship of the early sixteenth century.”

— William Manchester

34. “Let me first assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

— William Manchester

35. “A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys.”

— William Manchester

36. “I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.”

— William Manchester

37. “Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.”

— William Manchester

38. “In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. “It makes no difference,” Winston replied wryly. “The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.”

— William Manchester

39. “Exploring the mind of the psychotic is impossible – the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze.”

— William Manchester

40. “I like to live in the past. I don’t think people are going to get much fun in the future.”

— William Manchester

41. “John Kennedy once remarked that “victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

— William Manchester

42. “Where men wound up largely depended upon how athletic their wives were.”

— William Manchester

43. “The heart of the other quotation, from Lincoln, was: “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, these shops might as well be closed to any other business. I do the very best I know how, and I mean to keep doing so to the end.”

— William Manchester

44. “Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.”

— William Manchester

45. “Tell me the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world’s petroleum reserves when the war is over,” Ickes proclaimed, “and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come.”

— William Manchester

46. “Obviously it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment. One might as well try to photograph nostalgia or submit passion as an exhibit. Honor, integrity, and love – and hate – cannot be pierced with thumbtacks and displayed on bulletin boards. Yet all exist. Some motives reside beyond the rules of evidence.”

— William Manchester

47. “Social security was the most emotional issue that session. Republicans protested that if the administration bill were passed, children would no longer support their parents, the payroll tax would discourage workmen so much that they would quit their jobs, and that, taken all in all, the measure would remove the “romance of life.”

— William Manchester

48. “Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”

— William Manchester

49. “He loved books and wrote of them: “if you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle or, as it were, fondle them: peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what it is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends. Let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”

— William Manchester

50. “Violence had brought the United States independence, freed the slaves, and first conquered the West and then tamed it. Now it had raised working men up from the industrial cellar. Labor might forget that and turn conservative, but for liberals to deny other oppressed groups the right to revolt would prove impossible. Thus were the seeds of later anguish planted in innocence, even in idealism.”

— William Manchester