Churchill and books

Writing about Winston S. Churchill and books, Patrick Kurp quotes from an essay by the great man:

‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate, handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition. (more)

Patrick Kurp, "Let Them at Any Rate Be Your Acquaintances," Anecdotal Evidence, June 19, 2025.

The way he said it

K. Alan Snyder is working on a paper describing Dorothy L. Sayers's arguments for sound education. Sayer's most well-known paper on the subject is “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which has been part of the inspiration of the classical school movement. Dr. Snyder, doing research at the Wade Center, has discovered an unpublished Sayers lecture about one of those "lost" tools, rhetoric. Sayers on Churchill's effective use of rhetoric:

The cornerstone for this address was the example of Winston Churchill, a leader that Sayers believed had rejuvenated the impact of effective rhetoric. She comments, “At the beginning of the last war, an extraordinary wave of excitement & vivification ran through the nation when Mr. Churchill began to speak on the wireless.”

Sayers adds, “It was not so much what he said—though that was heartening & good—as the way he said it, which was electrical. Events (which were agitating enough) helped of course to put us into the mood to be moved; but at first events were so depressing that if they had been talked about in the old way we should probably have sunk into a lethargy of discouragement.”

Throughout the war, Sayers notes, “that resonant voice trumpeted its way through bad times & good.” Even people who weren’t fans of Churchill or his politics were stirred by the rhetoric of his famous speeches in those dire times. They “drank in great lifesaving draughts of stimulating language with body in it. That marked, I believe, the first steps in the Revival of Rhetoric.”

Dr. K. Alan Snyder, "Dorothy L. Sayers & the Revival of Rhetoric," Pondering Principles, May 17, 2024.

Courage

According to Western tradition:

"...the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues refers to the union of two sets of virtues. The four cardinal virtues, from ancient Greek philosophy, are prudence, justice, temperance (or restraint), and courage (or fortitude). The three theological virtues, from the letters of St. Paul of Tarsus, are faith, hope, and charity (or love).

Peter Kreeft:

The four cardinal virtues – justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) – come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws.

These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge." All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.

Courage may not be the greatest of virtues but it is the necessary one:

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
— C.S. Lewis

Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
— Samuel Johnson

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
— Winston Churchill

"The only guide to a man is his conscience"

On Sundays, The Free Press publishes Douglas Murray's "Things Worth Remembering," essays about things he has memorized. For the past twelve months, he chose poems. For the next twelve, it will be speeches. His first entry is from a speech delivered by Winston Churchill, a eulogy for Neville Chamberlain delivered in the House of Commons. Chamberlain had advocated the appeasement of Hitler. Churchill had vigorously disagreed. Events had proven Churchill right. But Churchill's eulogy was nevertheless, Murray writes, a "Gracious Farewell." The portion Murray quotes:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise, life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: Winston Churchill’s Gracious Farewell," The Free Press, February 18, 2024.

Feet of clay

Andrew Roberts, a Churchill biographer, reviews a recent collection of essays about Winston Churchill. Although, he writes, it "assembles [an] impressive expression of current academic thinking on Churchill," there is "no sense of actually celebrating [his] life and achievements."

“Viewed by some as the saviour of his nation, and by others as a racist imperialist,” states Cambridge University Press of one of its latest in the Cambridge Companions to History series, “who was Winston Churchill really, and how has he become such a controversial figure?”

A more honest wording might be: “Viewed by over 90% of Britons and Americans as the saviour of his nation and Civilisation, and by a small but growing band of ignorant idealogues as a racist imperialist, who was Winston Churchill really, and how did we manage to let a band of left-wing academics and Twitterati turn him into such a controversial figure?” ....

The Cambridge Companion will therefore give you plenty of insights into “how [Churchill] has become such a controversial figure,” but few into what made him the genius, hero and giant that he was and remains. Academics revel in pointing out their subjects’ feet of clay, but all too often pay too little attention to the marble in the rest of the statue. This is a relatively new phenomenon.

It is unclear quite when it became de rigueur for academics to avoid praising Winston Churchill. Amongst past academics who wrote in high praise of him are such genuine intellectual luminaries as Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss, A.L. Rowse, Hugh Trevor Roper, Martin Gilbert, Henry Pelling, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Asa Briggs, Alan Bullock, Paul Addison, A.J.P. Taylor and Roy Jenkins. These people—any one of whom was the equal or superior to anyone writing in this volume—did not feel that being mealy-mouthed about Churchill’s self-evident greatness was politically or professionally necessary, in the way all too many academics seem to nowadays. .... (more, in which Roberts comments on each of the the essays)

Andrew Roberts, "The Cambridge Companion to Winston Churchill: a Review," The Churchill Project, July 6, 2023.

"The only hope for the future"

From the end of "Sherlock Holmes Goes to Washington" (1943):

Evil in the world comes of evil men and evil deeds

From The Spectator, Christmas 1940:

.... No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message of peace and good will to all mankind should be sounding from every pulpit and rung out by the bells of every steeple.

All that is part of the eternal problem of evil, taking immense and terrible shape before our eyes. We can no more profess to plumb the mystery of it than generations of thinkers in the past who have admitted that when all is said there remains a residuum of mystery still. But evil in the world comes of evil men and evil deeds, and we have no choice but to be resisting that evil today. ....

As we keep our war-time Christmas, and survey with sober fortitude the chances that the coming year may bring, we can take stock of our position without misgiving. As the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons last week, ‘some sense of composure and even satisfaction’ is justified, though the dangers that still impend are so obvious and so grave as to dispel all temptation to undue optimism. ....

But we must recognise how critical is the situation still. The promise of help from America is of such cardinal importance that if it comes in time it may properly be looked on as the guarantee of victory. But it is a race with time still. .... (more)

The Spectator, Christmas 1940, reprinted in that magazine, "Christmas after our darkest hour," Dec. 25, 2022.

"Let us not wander away from the broad, fertile fields of freedom"

I just downloaded the Kindle edition of  Churchill by Himself: In His Own Words ($2.99). It seems a bargain—the Amazon price for the hardcover is $93.84. I've been browsing in a section titled "Political Theory and Practice." A sampling:

...civilisation implies, in any society, the freedom to criticise the government of the day; free speech; free press; free thought; free religious observance; no racial persecution; fair treatment of minorities; and courts of law and justice which have an authority independent of the executive and untainted by Party bias. (1939)

The strength and character of a national civilisation is not built up like a scaffolding or fitted together like a machine. Its growth is more like that of a plant or a tree....no one should ever cut one down without planting another. It is very much easier and quicker to cut down trees than to grow them. (1952)

[Communism and Fascism remind me] of the North Pole and the South Pole. They are at opposite ends of the earth, but if you woke up at either Pole tomorrow morning you could not tell which one it was. Perhaps there might he more penguins at one, or more Polar bears at the other; but all around would be ice and snow and the blast of a biting wind. I have made up my mind, however far I may travel, whatever countries I may see, I will not go to the Arctic or to the Antarctic Regions. Give me London, give me Paris, give me New York, give me some of the beautiful capitals of the British Dominions. Let us go somewhere where our breath is not frozen on our lips because of the Secret Police. Let us go somewhere where there are green pastures and the shade of venerable trees. Let us not wander away from the broad, fertile fields of freedom into these gaunt, grim, dim, gloomy abstractions of morbid and sterile thought. (1937)

Democracy as a guide or motive to progress has long been known to be incompetent. None of the legislative assemblies of the great modern states represents in universal suffrage even a fraction of the strength or wisdom of the community. Great nations are no longer led by their ablest men, or by those who know most about their immediate affairs, or even by those who have a coherent doctrine. Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet toward them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family. (1931)

...the only safe rule for doing justice electorally between man and man was to assume, a large assumption in some cases, that all men are equal and that all discriminations between them are unhealthy and undemocratic. (1906)

Richard M. Langworth (Editor), Churchill by Himself: In His Own Words, Rosetta Books, 2013)

“It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Goebbels wrote...

Britain got a very good king in 1936, especially compared to his older brother. I always find interesting books about the period leading up to World War II. This one is about the former King Edward VIII after his abdication:

Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King begins on Dec. 11, 1936, with the last act of Edward’s 326-day reign. As he read his abdication speech into a BBC microphone at Windsor Castle, Wallis listened in the South of France, muttering “the fool, the stupid fool.” Throwing over a kingship was only the beginning of his folly. Edward and Wallis soon had a new shared goal: To undo his error and her humiliation by returning to Britain, ideally as king and queen (and definitely without paying income tax). ....

Edward was not quite a man without qualities—he had a dim, paternalist care for “the workers,” and he looked great in plus-fours—but he was profoundly shallow. “Did that Mozart chap write anything else?” he was overheard asking after a concert. Wallis was harder and smarter, a Lady Macbeth on Benzedrine. Both were early admirers of Hitler.

Abdication freed them to mix more freely with the wrong sort of people. In June 1937, they married at the French castle of their wealthy friend Charles Bedaux, who held “extensive business interests in Nazi Germany” and had long been suspected as a German spy. It was Bedaux who arranged their German tour that October. The Windsors visited a Nazi youth camp, an SS training school, the Krupp arms factory and a concentration camp. No one knows what was discussed at their private Berchtesgaden tea, but, the New York Times reported, Hitler gave them both a fulsome goodbye before firing off a Nazi salute, which Edward reciprocated. “It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “With him we would have entered into an alliance.” ....

In neutral Madrid, the Windsors set up at the Ritz, where, the British ambassador said, “every word” was recorded by Nazi spies. The Spanish foreign minister reported that Edward blamed “the Jews and the Reds” for the war, wanted to put anti-Nazi British politicians “up against a wall,” and “seemed very much to hope” that Germany would bomb England “effectively,” to precipitate peace talks. ....

In the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis continued to socialize with pro-Nazi figures, including the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren, who...was involved in moving German money into South America. But their last chance had passed. The rest of their story, and the rest of Mr. Lownie’s narrative, descends into freeloading, snobbery and irrelevance. They never paid for anything, treachery included. (the review)

Dominic Green, "‘Traitor King’ Review: A Royal Without Honor'," The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2022.

Riddled with factual errors

When your work is reviewed by someone who is a scholar on the subject. From Churchill biographer, Andrew Roberts, "What the Marxist Tariq Ali gets wrong about Winston Churchill":

Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist, believes that a ‘Churchill cult’ is ‘drowning all serious debate’ about the wartime leader, and that ‘an alternative was badly needed’. He has therefore written a book that parrots every earlier revisionist slur about Churchill – war criminal, evil imperialist, mass murderer, pro-fascist....

There’s a general rule in biography, as in journalism, that knocking copy ought to be better researched than ordinary writing, but it is not one that Ali observes. He makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaught.

The book claims that Churchill ‘had been little more than a clever politician engaged in career building’ before he became prime minister in 1940. Not so. He had already helped create the welfare state, readied the Royal Navy for the Great War and warned the world about the rise of the Nazis, among many other significant achievements. Explaining Churchill’s supposed unpopularity during the second world war, Ali claims it was because ‘the men fleeing Dunkirk knew how unprepared and badly armed they were’. Yet Churchill had been demanding higher defence spending throughout his wilderness years.

Ali further claims that in 1943, a Gallup Poll ‘revealed that only one third of the population expressed satisfaction with the war cabinet, i.e. Churchill’. Yet Churchill was not the war cabinet, and Gallup actually recorded Churchill’s personal popularity remaining above 80 per cent throughout his wartime premiership – dipping briefly for a single month to 78 per cent – and on three occasions reaching 93 per cent. The statement that the Conservatives lost the 1945 election due to ‘anti-Churchill feeling’ is similarly wrong. The Tories would have done much worse if he had not been their leader. They lost because the electorate, while admiring Churchill personally, wanted the welfare state, nationalisation and the ‘New Jerusalem’ offered by Clement Attlee (whose name is consistently misspelt in this book). .... (and much more)

Andrew Roberts, "What the Marxist Tariq Ali gets wrong about Winston Churchill," The Spectator, May 14, 2022.

"Weighed in the balance"

I recently watched Netflix's Munich—The Edge of War and enjoyed it. Andrew Roberts, biographer of Churchill, watched it, too, and wrote “The movie Munich is well-written (based on Robert Harris’s bestselling 2017 thriller), lavishly produced (by Netflix), fast-paced—and an absolute historical travesty.” His review of the film, "Munich: The Edge of Nonsense" is an excellent take-down of the film's version of history by someone thoroughly familiar with the subject. Movies are rarely a very good way to learn history.

Prime Minister Chamberlain returned from Munich professing that he had won "peace for our time" and he had "...got the impression that here was a man [Hitler] who could be relied upon when he had given his word."

Churchill was unconvinced and addressed the Munich Agreement in the House of Commons on October 5, 1938:

The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. But never will you have friendship with the present German Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy. ....

I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week – I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:

“Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

On the anniversary of Churchill's birth

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, November 30, 1874, Blenheim, Oxfordshire, England.

Books

In "How Churchill Used Shakespeare to Change the World" Churchill himself is quoted:

If you cannot read all your books at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on your shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

Gordon in Sudan

Conan Doyle tells us in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" that a picture of General Charles George Gordon ("Chinese" Gordon) hung on the wall at 221b Baker Street. Gordon was an actual historical personage of some importance. Today I came across a review of an early book by Winston S. Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, written when Churchill was only twenty-five.

Churchill also recognizes the considerable merits of General Charles George Gordon (also known as Gordon Pasha) whom the British sent to oversee Egypt’s withdrawal from the Sudan. In 1885, Gordon lost his life in the city of Khartoum: Mahdist forces overwhelmed his palace as Prime Minister William Gladstone’s government dithered about coming to his rescue. Gordon was an accomplished general, as well as a man of deep principle and Christian faith. He had warred on slavery in the Sudanese territories out of a deep respect for the dignity of all persons. But his moral rectitude and prideful self-assurance led to imprudence and an excessive confidence in his own judgment. Churchill’s final assessment of Gordon is respectful with an undercurrent of doubt and criticism. He was, in Churchill’s estimation, “a man of stainless honour and enduring courage” and “the severity of his religion did not impair the amiability of his character.” His opinions were not always sound but “the justice of his actions” was generally beyond dispute.

Daniel J. Mahoney, "To Conquer with Chivalry and Mercy: Churchill's River War is the work of a great statesman and thinker."

"A peculiar type of brainy people"

Winston Churchill, from his St. George’s Day speech in April, 1933:

.... The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.

Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?….

WinstonChurchill.org: Wit and Wisdom – “St. George and the Dragon”

Reading history

Matthew Franck recommends several non-academic historians—C.V. Wedgwood, Barbara Tuchman, Antonia Fraser, Winston Churchill, Paul Johnson—all of whom I have read (but not all they have written). This is history that is fun to read. His list is hardly exhaustive but it is a good one. This is what he writes about Johnson:

If a history of Europe in the fourteenth century is ambitious, how about the whole world in a period just closing as the author writes? That was the subject of the prolific British journalist and author Paul Johnson in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (1983). This is highly opinionated conservative history writing, but eminently readable and with a strongly argued thesis about modern totalitarianism’s threat to the freedom of the human mind. Johnson punctuates his tale with vignettes that show the follies of the great and the good, as when George Bernard Shaw, during the Soviet Union’s 1932 famine, “threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier ‘convinced that there were no shortages in Russia.’ ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’ he asked, glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metropole.”

Regarding Churchill:

.... The day after Churchill’s death in 1965, the political philosopher Leo Strauss said to his graduate seminar at the University of Chicago, “Not a whit less important than [Churchill’s] deeds and speeches are his writings, above all his Marlborough—the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.”

Isolation Bookshelf: History Outside the Academy - Public Discourse

Churchill

Caricature of Winston Churchill found at Old Book Illustrations. The book it is found in was published in 1913. World War I began in 1914. He was First Lord of the Admiralty when that war began.

"We shape our buildings..."

Steven Hayward, thinking about the destruction and potential reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral, is reminded of Winston Churchill's speech about rebuilding the House of Commons Chamber after it was destroyed by a German bomb during the Second World War. Churchill famously said “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This is especially true of places of worship. Churchill:

I beg to move, "That a Select Committee be appointed to consider and report upon plans for the rebuilding of the House of Commons and upon such alterations as may be considered desirable while preserving all its essential features." On the night of 10^th May, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. Having dwelt and served for more than 40 years in the late Chamber, and having derived fiery great pleasure and advantage therefrom, I, naturally, would like to see it restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity. I believe that will be the opinion of the great majority of its Members. It is certainly the opinion of His Majesty’s Government and we propose to support this resolution to the best of our ability. .... (more)

“We Shape Our Buildings...” | Power Line

Heist

At CrimeReads a list of ten novels about elaborate criminal plots. A few of those I've read (the films were really good, too):

Elmore Leonard, Out of Sight

...[I]mperturbably cool bank robber Jack Foley escapes from prison, but ends up locked in a trunk with Federal Marshal Karen Sisco. Leonard’s great ear for dialogue and deep sense of place and time give his books a unique feeling: the character-driven caper novel, in which, much like life, all our plans and plots confound and complicate each other in seemingly random ways. But like a pool hustler pulling off a sweet trick, all the balls ricochet off of each other and fall, elegantly, into perfect place.

Jim Thompson, The Getaway

Here the heist novel becomes a journey to the heart of noir darkness, as the classic pulp artist spins the tale of ace bank robber Doc McCoy and his wife Carol. Their path, from jail to job to a run for the border, is littered with double-crosses and betrayals, and ends in a symbolic hell where, inevitably, those who live by crime and deceit are doomed to devour each other. Also made into the awesome Steve McQueen/Ali McGraw movie by the equally great and grim Sam Peckinpah.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

A bit of a curveball, I know, or better yet a screwball, but farce shares a lot with the heist story: a plan is concocted to achieve some goal and immediately goes wrong, necessitating a new plan and so on, into glorious delirium. Bertie and his gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves are constantly conspiring to steal or retrieve treasured objects—in this case a coveted silver cow creamer—and their schemes involve all manner of disguises, impersonations, and climbing over walls and into windows while evading the cops, though the stakes, and the body count, are admittedly quite a bit lower. Read this as a refreshing break between the others, and meet the Maestro. There is no one better.

Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed

I decided to end with this because it is both an interesting take on the form and exactly the kind of thrilling, suspenseful, high-spirited adventure that drew me to the caper book in the first place. Set during WWII, it concerns a German plot to, get this, kidnap Winston Churchill. The outlandishness of that scheme is only the beginning, but the intricate plan, the twists, crises, and daring solutions are expertly woven into real history—just the thing to capture the imagination of the fourteen-year-old in us all.

The Art of the Heist | CrimeReads

The worst form of government

I have quite a few books in my library related to Winston S. Churchill: biographies, collections of photographs, and books by himself. I acquired this one from the gift shop of the National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. From the chapter on "Government and Economies":

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 all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - House of Commons

And again:

The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. No one pretends that Democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"

I had thought this next was contributed by Orson Welles to the script of The Third Man (1949). I didn't realize Welles had borrowed it from Churchill.

Look at the Swiss! They have enjoyed peace for centuries. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock! - 1938

More:

Some people's idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."

I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.

Expenditure always is popular; the only unpopular part about it is the raising of the money to pay the expenditure. - House of Commons, 1901

The electors, based on universal suffrage, may do what they like, and afterwards they have to like what they do. - Blackpool, 1946