Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, RAwas a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a non-academic historian, a writer, and an artist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWorld Leader
Date of Birth30 November 1874
CityWoodstock, England
In handing over the Government of India to these so-called political classes, we are handing over to men of straw, of whom, in a few years, no trace will remain.
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India ... Our fight is hard. It will also be long ... But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open.
I shall endeavor to marshal British opinion against a course of action which would bring in my opinion the greatest evils upon the people of India, upon the people of Great Britain and upon the British Empire itself.
It is alarming ... to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience.
If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.
Better to dare mighty things and fail than to live in a grey twilight where there is neither victory nor defeat.
I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages ... From Gibbon I went to Macauley. I had learnt The Lays of Ancient Rome by heart, and loved them; and of course I knew he had written a history; but I had never read a page of it ... I accepted all Macauley wrote as gospel, and I was grieved to read his harsh judgements upon the Great Duke of Marlborough.
How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years.
It was at "Little Lodge" I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as 'the Governess' was announced.
The privilege of a university education is a great one; the more widely it is extended the better for any country.
The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.
If you simply take up the attitude of defending a mistake, there will no hope of improvement.
Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.