Martin Gilbert > Quotes

“In the Commons, Churchill defended his cutting back on the imprisonment of young offenders by drawing Members’ attention to the fact that ‘the evil only falls on the sons of the working classes. The sons of other classes commit many of the same offences. In their boisterous and exuberant spirits in their days at Oxford and Cambridge they commit offences—for which scores of the sons of the working class are committed to prison—without any injury being inflicted on them.’ There”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“We must learn to draw from misfortune the means of future strength.”
― Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (Volume V)

“Within seven months, more than 600,000 Armenians were massacred. Of the 500,000 deported during that same period, more than 400,000 perished as a result of the brutalities and privations of the southward march into Syria and Mesopotamia. By September as many as a million Armenians were dead, the victims of what later became known as genocide, later still as ethnic cleansing. A further 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Now it was the Germans who had to fall back to new defensive positions. Among the German soldiers who had fought throughout the retreat was Corporal Hitler. On August 4 he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, for ‘personal bravery and general merit’. This was an unusual decoration for a corporal. Hitler wore it for the rest of his life. The regimental adjutant who recommended him for it, Captain Hugo Guttman, was a Jew.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“If the war was to be over by Christmas, as many believed, or at the latest by Easter 1915, tens of thousands of soldiers might be killed or wounded before the guns fell silent. Every army believed that it could crush its opponents within a few months.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“In one day alone, at the end of December, as a result of frostbite, more than fourteen thousand German soldiers had been forced to submit to amputation. Not all of them survived the operation.”
― Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

“That winter the son’s need for his father’s love was again disappointed. On November 10, three weeks before his twelfth birthday, he wrote to him, ‘You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.’ This was the second time his father had been in Brighton but had not gone to see him.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“The woman crawled on the earth, took hold of his boot and pleaded for mercy. But the soldier took the boy and hit him with his head against the wall, once, twice, smashed him against the wall.”
― Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

“ten thousand Soviet evacuees had been drowned off Tallinn, and twenty-three thousand Hungarian Jews murdered at Kamenets Podolsk, in the same three day period. But these were far from the only deaths in those few August days.”
― Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

“Of the 850,000 Indian soldiers who left the subcontinent during the First World War, 49,000 were killed in action. India also made her contribution to the material aspects of the Allied struggle, including the manufacture of 555 million bullets and more than a million shells. Over 55,000 Indians served in the Indian Labour Corps, as butchers, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and washermen. Many did menial work within range of the enemy guns. In Delhi, a monumental arch records the Indian losses, India’s contribution in blood to the Allied war effort.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Even if the tutoring was only for one hour a day, he told his mother, ‘I shall feel that I have got to be back at a certain time and it would hang like a dark shadow over my pleasure’.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“Ludendorff and Hindenburg explained to the Kaiser that the problem was not only the German soldiers’ will and ability to fight, but also President Wilson’s deep reluctance to negotiate in any way with the Kaiser himself or his military chiefs. Grasping not only the nettle of military defeat, but also that of political democratisation, the Kaiser signed a proclamation establishing a Parliamentary regime. In the space of a single day, Germany’s militarism and autocracy were all but over.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“His finest hour was the leadership of Britain when it was most isolated, most threatened and most weak; when his own courage, determination and belief in democracy became at one with the nation.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“Churchill later recalled, of his near meeting with Hitler: ‘In the course of conversation with Hanfstaengl, I happened to say “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?” He must have repeated this to Hitler, because about noon the next day he came round with rather a serious air and said that the appointment he had made with me to meet Hitler could not take place as the Fuehrer would not be coming to the hotel that afternoon. This was the last I saw of “Putzi” – for such was his pet name – although we stayed several more days at the hotel.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship

“On June 3, Britain, France and Italy announced their full support for Polish, Czech and Yugoslav statehood. On the following day, encouraged to do so by the British, Dr Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, met the Emir Feisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt, near the port of Akaba, and worked out with him what seemed to be a satisfactory Arab support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. A senior British general noted after the meeting that both T.E. Lawrence, who helped set the meeting up, and Weizmann, ‘see the lines of Arab & Zionist policy converging in the not distant future”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“For the first time since 1815, Russia was denied control of the Polish capital. It was a signal triumph for the Central Powers. The Germans now set their long-term sights on Finland, Russia’s province since the Swedes had been driven out in 1808.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“There was a middle way between capitalism and socialism. ‘I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition,’ Churchill told his Glasgow audience, ‘but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour, yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition to run downwards. We do not want to pull down the structures of science and civilisation; but to spread a net over the abyss.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“the slave labour system, already applied to Jews, was extended to Poles, just as it already applied to Czechs. ‘A hundred thousand Czech workmen’, Churchill told a public audience in Manchester on January 27, ‘had been led off into slavery to be toiled to death in Germany.’ But what was happening to the Czechs, Churchill added, ‘pales in comparison with the atrocities which, as I speak here this afternoon, are being perpetrated upon the Poles’. From the ‘shameful records’ of the Germans’ mass executions in Poland, Churchill declared, ‘we may judge what our fate would be if we fell into their clutches. But from them also we may draw the force and inspiration to carry us forward on our journey and not to pause or rest till liberation is achieved and justice is done.”
― Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

“in towns and villages throughout the Ukraine, several thousand Jews were being murdered by anti-Bolshevik Whites, whose historic anti-Semitism, combining with a new hatred of the noted Jewish presence among the Bolshevik leadership, renewed the violent pogroms of a decade and a half earlier.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Democracy, I say, is not based on violence or terrorism, but on reason, on fair play, on freedom, on respecting other people’s rights as well as their ambitions.”
― Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, 1941-1945

“He never flinched, he never cringed, but he died as one would wish all Englishmen to die—quietly and undramatically,”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Indian Corps and the 4th Corps will push through the barrage of fire regardless of loss, using reserves if required.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“It was five months since Haig had told the British War Council: ‘The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon and two per battalion is more than sufficient.’ He was once again being proved terribly wrong.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“In the third week of April the stalemate on the Western Front was marked by a new and unpleasant phase: one that was intended by the Germans to end the stalemate and lead to victory. It was on April 22 that gas was used for the first time in the First World War. That evening, near Langemarck in the Ypres Salient, the Germans discharged, within five minutes, 168 tons of chlorine from 4,000 cylinders against two French divisions, one Algerian, the other Territorial, and against the adjacent Canadian Division, over a four-mile front.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Neville Chamberlain, commented in a private letter on the persecution of German Jews: ‘I believe the persecution arose out of two motives: a desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.’ Chamberlain continued: ‘No doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.’37”
― Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust

“the Germans were ‘picking out the revolutionists and Liberals from the many Russian prisoners of war, furnishing them with money and false passports and papers, and sending them back to Russia to stir up a revolution”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Hitler’s entourage quickly learned what he had in mind. On September 9 Colonel Eduard Wagner discussed the future of Poland with Hitler’s Army Chief of Staff, General Halder. ‘It is the Führer’s and Goering’s intention’, Wagner wrote in his diary, ‘to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation. More than that cannot even be hinted at in writing.”
― Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

“The mild and vague Liberalism of the early years of the twentieth century, the surge of fantastic hopes and illusions that followed the armistice of the Great War have already been superseded by a violent reaction against Parliamentary and electioneering procedure and by the establishment of dictatorships real or veiled in almost every country. Moreover the loss of our external connections, the shrinkage in foreign trade and shipping brings the surplus population of Britain within measurable distance of utter ruin.”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

“bottom”
― Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life