Top 120 Winston S. Churchill Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities... Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.”

— Winston S. Churchill

52. “But if, on the contrary, you are inclined – late in life though it be – to reconnoitre a foreign sphere of limitless extent, then be persuaded that the first quality that is needed is Audacity.”

— Winston S. Churchill

53. “In contrast to this, it is not in our interest to abandon Constantinople to Russia and Bulgaria to Bolshevism. But even here it should be possible, with good intentions, to reach a solution which will avoid the worst and facilitate what we want. It will be easier to find a solution if Moscow is clear that nothing obliges us to accept an arrangement which is not satisfactory to us.”

— Winston S. Churchill

54. “Cromwell’s imperious words to the Long Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

— Winston S. Churchill

55. “Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”

— Winston S. Churchill

56. “Let it never be said that you crept into the crypt, crapped, and crept out again.”

— Winston S. Churchill

57. “A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”

— Winston S. Churchill

58. “All comes out even at the end of the day, and all will come out yet more even when all the days are ended.”

— Winston S. Churchill

59. “Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

— Winston S. Churchill

60. “He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.”

— Winston S. Churchill

61. “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

— Winston S. Churchill

62. “But you ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it is they who made it famous.”

— Winston S. Churchill

63. “Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.”

— Winston S. Churchill

64. “It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.”

— Winston S. Churchill

65. “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The.”

— Winston S. Churchill

66. “Logic, like science, must be the servant and not the master of man.”

— Winston S. Churchill

67. “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”

— Winston S. Churchill

68. “One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision. Life is a whole, and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be separated from the rest.”

— Winston S. Churchill

69. “But Governments and peoples do not always take rational decisions. Sometimes they take mad decisions, or one set of people get control who compel all others to obey and aid them in folly.”

— Winston S. Churchill

70. “The prejudice of the Americans against monarchy, which Mr. Lloyd George made no attempt to counteract, had made it clear to the beaten Empire that it would have better treatment from the Allies as a republic than as a monarchy. Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the person of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a Council of Regency.”

— Winston S. Churchill

71. “Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.”

— Winston S. Churchill

72. “Strange as it may seem, the Air Force, except in the air, is the least mobile of all the services. A squadron can reach its destination in a few hours, but its establishments, depots, fuel, spare parts, and workshops take many weeks, and even months, to develop.”

— Winston S. Churchill

73. “The maxim, “Nothing prevails but perfection,” may be spelled PARALYSIS.”

— Winston S. Churchill

74. “I’ve gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

— Winston S. Churchill

75. “In every age there comes a time when a leader must come forward to meet the needs of the hour. Therefore, there is no potential leader who does not have the opportunity to make a positive difference in society.”

— Winston S. Churchill

76. “Guard them well, admirals and captains, hardy tars and tall marines; guard them well and guide them true.”

— Winston S. Churchill

77. “An old battleax of a woman said to Winston Churchill, “If you were my husband I would put poison in your tea.” Churchill’s response, “Ma’am if you were my wife I would drink it.”

— Winston S. Churchill

78. “The Bolsheviks do not represent Russia, they represent an international conception of human affairs entirely foreign and indeed hostile to anything we know of civilisation;.”

— Winston S. Churchill

79. “The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.”

— Winston S. Churchill

80. “Mr. Attlee is a modest man with much to be modest about.”

— Winston S. Churchill

81. “The worst quarrels only arise when both sides are equally in the right and in the wrong.”

— Winston S. Churchill

82. “Libya, Eritrea, Abyssinia, Somaliland, nourished by Italian taxation, comprised a vast region in which nearly a quarter of a million Italian colonists toiled, and began to thrive, under the protection of more than four hundred thousand Italian and native troops.”

— Winston S. Churchill

83. “Bolsheviks create their own difficulties which they successfully overcame later.”

— Winston S. Churchill

84. “When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed... why should we fear for our future?”

— Winston S. Churchill

85. “In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” he replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now.”

— Winston S. Churchill

86. “Trying to maintain good relations with a Communist is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it over the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up!”

— Winston S. Churchill

87. “No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world.”

— Winston S. Churchill

88. “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

— Winston S. Churchill

89. “Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.”

— Winston S. Churchill

90. “In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life. So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment when from all quarters enemies rush upon you. Such.”

— Winston S. Churchill

91. “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong; and a boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he escape the perils of youth, an independence and vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days.”

— Winston S. Churchill

92. “A prodigious event had happened. The monotony of toil and of the daily round was suddenly broken. Everything was strange and new. War aroused the primordial instincts of races born of strife. Adventure beckoned to her children. A larger, nobler life seemed to be about to open upon the world. But it was, in fact, only Death.”

— Winston S. Churchill

93. “The camel once swallowed, the gnats went down easily enough.”

— Winston S. Churchill

94. “We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation 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 other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.”

— Winston S. Churchill

95. “Now all our hope is to regulate the unthinkable. Regulated unthinkability – that is the proposal now; and very soon it will be a question of making up our minds to unregulated unthinkability.”

— Winston S. Churchill

96. “One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, Wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, Are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.” – Lady Diana Cooper, 1965.”

— Winston S. Churchill

97. “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”

— Winston S. Churchill

98. “If you are walking through hell, keep walking!”

— Winston S. Churchill

99. “Occasionally a man stumbles over the truth. Most dust themselves off and continue walking as though nothing had happened.”

— Winston S. Churchill

100. “Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.”

— Winston S. Churchill