QUOTES

These fake quotes make for good storytelling, but popular myth has falsely attributed them to Winston Churchill.

Conservative by the Time You’re 35

‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’

There is no record of anyone hearing Winston Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University made this comment: ‘Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35!  And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?’

Courage

‘Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.’

This fake quote is very often attributed to Churchill but appears nowhere in the Churchill canon.

Cross of Lorraine

‘The hardest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine.’

This remark about the intractable Charles de Gaulle was actually made by General Spears, Churchill’s envoy to France.

Enemies

‘You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.’

‘[Lloyd George had a moderately phrased amendment but] soon became animated and even violent. I constructed in succession sentence after sentence to hook on with after he should sit down.…Then Mr. Bowles whispered “You might say ‘instead of making his violent speech without moving his moderate amendment, he had better have moved his moderate amendment without making his violent speech.’” Manna in the wilderness was not more welcome!.…I was up before I knew it, and reciting Tommy Bowles’s rescuing sentence. It won a general cheer.…Everyone was very kind. The usual restoratives were applied, and I sat in a comfortable coma till I was strong enough to go home.’

‘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, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor.… From Gibbon I went to Macaulay. I had learnt [as a boy] 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 Macaulay wrote as gospel, and I was grieved to read his harsh judgments upon the Great Duke of Marlborough. There was no one at hand to tell me that this historian with his captivating style and devastating self-confidence was the prince of literary rogues, who always preferred the tale to the truth, and smirched or glorified great men and garbled documents according as they affected his drama.’

‘…it is better to be both right and consistent. But if you have to choose—you must choose to be right.’

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947