William Manchester · 1232 pages
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“His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours “persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler’s fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Tell me the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world’s petroleum reserves when the war is over,” Ickes proclaimed, “and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Then, after calling”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“It meant good-bye to London and to Churchill, whose company Harriman thoroughly enjoyed, and to Pamela, whose bed he enjoyed (the lovers’ hiatus lasted almost three decades, until 1971, when Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward became the third Mrs. Harriman).”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not—Churchill’s state funeral—in motion. On the flight to London, Churchill, heavily sedated, awoke, and muttered to Montague Browne: “I don’t think I’ll go back to that place, it’s unlucky. First Toby, and then this.” Montague Browne had forgotten Toby, the budgerigar, but Churchill had not. The body was frail, but not the wit.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“The truth is so precious,” Churchill told Stalin, “that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“In Churchill’s moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees.”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“Sherwood, Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter and biographer, wrote that although Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol… continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours,” it did so “without visible effect on his health or mental processes. Anyone who suggested he became befuddled with drink obviously never had to become involved in an argument with him on some factual problem late at night….” Churchill’s drinking habits, Sherwood wrote, were “unique” and his capacity “Olympian.”18 Despite his prolonged, consistent, and prodigious consumption of alcohol, Churchill was not a drunk. But neither was he a moderate social drinker,”
― William Manchester, quote from The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
“After that, Lily was recuperating and then
dealing with significant financial hardships. The
birth was described to me by Lily and also by
her obstetrician, who I spoke to myself yesterday.
The doctor, in his own words, remembers what
he describes as that ‘hideous day’ like it was yesterday.
The labour, intense and excruciating, lasted
for days. In the end, in extreme distress at
the length of the labour, the baby nearly died.
Lily did die. She was flatline for two minutes and
thirty-eight –”
Alistair didn’t get the opportunity to finish his
grand statement because Nate surged out of his
chair so fast, it flew on its wheels and shot across
the room, slamming into the wall.
“Mr. McAllister…” Alistair said warningly
but Nate was coming swiftly around the table,
coming at her.
At this sight, Lily, too, jumped out of her chair
in a panic, her numbness not that complete, and
backed away in self-defence as Nate came at her,
came at her with purposeful, long strides. She
backed up jerkily, one hand behind her, one hand
in front, retreating until she hit the wall. Before
she knew what he was about, his hard chest came
up against her hand, pushing it back and his body
pressed against hers.
Terrified and confused at this sudden change,
she looked to the right and to the left, anywhere
for escape, anywhere but at Nate.
And to her shock, his hands caught her face,
resting one on either side, gently trying to force
her to look into his impossibly dark eyes.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered and the absolute
ache dripping from his first words said to her
since she found out he was alive cut through her
thin shield of numbness like a razor.
She attempted to pull her face free but his
hands tightened.
“Lily, I didn’t know,” he repeated, and she
caught his eyes and they were glittering dark with
something that she couldn’t read, something
hideously painful and she had to get away from
it. Was desperate to get away from it. She needed
to flee.
She tried to look over his shoulder but he was
too tall, too close. Things were happening in the
room, there was urgent talk, maybe even a tussle.
But all she could see was Nate.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Three Wishes
“The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been.”
― Luo Guanzhong, quote from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Vol. 1: (with footnotes and maps) (Romance of the Three Kingdoms (with footnotes and maps))
“I’m glad I’ve impressed you,” she says. I can’t believe this woman. What the fuck did I ever do to deserve someone like her? To deserve the look she’s giving me right now? It’s a mystery I’ll never be able to work out. “Sloane, always consider me impressed.”
― quote from Collateral
“Let your heart travel lightly. Because what you bring with you becomes part of the landscape.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Sebastian
“It scared me how much he affected me, and I don't even think he was trying all that hard.”
― Kelly Oram, quote from V is for Virgin
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