“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! […] Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”
Winston Churchill (verified)
Churchill reflecting on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the Second World War.
The Second World War (Primary source)
Churchill’s six-volume memoir and history of World War II, chronicling his leadership as Britain’s wartime Prime Minister. Combining personal experience with strategic analysis, it covers major battles, diplomatic negotiations, and key decisions that shaped Allied victory. The work earned Churchill the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s-breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists. No doubt it would take a long time. I expected terrible forfeits in the East; but all this would be merely a passing phase. United we could subdue everybody else in the world. Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end.”
Winston Churchill (verified)
“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)“Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)“The maxim Nothing avails but perfection may be spelt shorter: Paralysis.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)More quotes by Winston Churchill →
“One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education… The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books, but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt (verified)“For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent.”
— Winston Churchill (verified)“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
— Ernest Hemingway (verified)“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”
— Ernest Hemingway (verified)