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41 " Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran. "
― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
42 " The true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance. "
― Andrew Roberts , Napoleon: A Life
43 " concentrated "
44 " sangfroid. "
― Andrew Roberts , Churchill: Walking with Destiny
45 " The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy, "
46 " The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years. "
47 " the first time that Churchill dialled a telephone number himself was when he was seventy-three. 13 (It was to the speaking clock, which he thanked politely.) "
48 " On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War ) "
― Andrew Roberts
49 " Nothing short of military defeat demoralizes a country so totally as hyper-inflation, and the Directory, "
50 " We owe to the Jews,’ wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, ‘a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together. "
― Andrew Roberts , The Modern Swastika: Fighting Today's anti-Semitism
51 " I am arrogant,’ he once said of himself in a perceptive piece of self-analysis, ‘but not conceited. "
52 " Israel is denounced as a colonial State, an artificial state, a new state, as though that’s unusual in the region. Jordan, Syria and Iraq all owe their genesis to the 1920s rather than the ancient mists of Time, "
53 " I realized that I must be on my best behaviour,’ as he later put it, ‘punctual, subdued, reserved; in short, display all the qualities with which I am least endowed. "
54 " The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October. ‘The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. "
55 " It was felt that to admit defeat at the hands of a Muslim power would weaken the British Empire, which ruled over tens of millions of Muslims – and in India particularly prestige was more important than sheer military power. "
56 " Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees the others. "
57 " There is no end to the grotesque absurdities that would follow the passing of this measure. It would be possible for women to have a vote while living in a state of prostitution; if she married and became an honest woman she would lose that vote, but she could regain it through divorce.’25 A regular criticism of Churchill was that, as Asquith put it to his close friend Venetia Stanley,* ‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ meaning that he adopted policies because they sounded good in speeches. "
58 " In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable. Churchill "
59 " In April, Churchill decided he should try to alter his speaking style, to make it less sonorous and Victorian, to avoid sounding pompous to younger listeners. At sixty, he was an old dog to be learning new oratorical tricks, "
60 " Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. "