Randolph Churchill Quotes

At one level, the Opposition's most urgent job, between now and the next election, is to publicise the government's mistakes. Randolph Churchill once declared that oppositions should oppose everything, propose nothing and turf the government out. He was right in this fundamental respect: the opposition's job is to get elected. Intelligent oppositions have no unnecessary enemies. They make the government rather than themselves the issue by ensuring that everyone harmed by government decisions well and truly knows about it.

His idea of a good dinner, he said, was to dine well and then "to discuss a good topic- with myself as the chief conversationalist." After one meal his son, Randolph was trying to make a point. Churchill broke in with a comment of his own. Randolph tried to pick up the thread of his argument. His father barked: "Don't interrupt me when I am interrupting!

Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

When he went through a cancer scare and had a benign tumor removed, his sometime friend Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was typical of modern science to find the only part of him that was not malignant and remove it. Randolph was an alcoholic for most of his adult life,

was brilliant. It is a pleasure to hear really well-informed talk, unpunctuated by foolish and ignorant remarks (except occasionally from Randolph), and it is a relief to be in the background with occasional commissions to execute, but few views to express, instead of being expected to be interesting because one is the P.M.’s Private Secretary.

A great, crude, strong, young people are the Americans - like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well bred ladies and gentlemen . . . Picture to yourself the American people as a great lusty youth - who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners - whom neither age nor just tradition inspire with reverence - but who moves about his affairs with a good hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth [Winston S. Churchill to his brother Jack]

Winston Churchill’s son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn’t read the entire Bible in a fortnight: ‘Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud “I say I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible . . . ” or merely slapping his side & chortling “God, isn’t God a shit!”’16

Winston Churchill was twenty when his father died. Lord Randolph had lived to see his son grow up, and to be bitterly disappointed by him, a disappointment he never disguised. Both parents treated their son appallingly. They were both, in different but odious ways, wholly absorbed in themselves and their own lives, Lord Randolph with politics and finance, Jennie with luncheons and lovers. They rarely visited him at his schools or even wrote to him, leaving him to find what emotional support he could from his nanny, Mrs Everest; a neglect which had curious results.

A squadron of Vautours, Israel's longest range fighter-bombers, landed and taxied in pairs up to a ramp. A stop watch was started the second they touched down. Within 7½ minutes the aircraft had been filled up with fuel and oxygen, their cannons had been reloaded with ammunition, ten bombs had been hung from their wings and they were airborne once again. After the war one of the attachés asked General Hod how long the turn-around time of the Israeli aircraft had been. Hod replied that he had seen

I shall have to stiffen the administration and the Aliens Act a little, and more effective measures must be taken by the police to supervise the dangerous classes of aliens in our midst…. Churchill

The King was one of the first to bring up the question. ‘He hopes,’ wrote his private secretary Sir Arthur Bigge, on 5 January 1911 ‘that these outrages by foreigners will lead you to consider whether the Aliens Act could not be amended so as to prevent London from being infested with men and women whose presence would not be tolerated in any other country.

Churchill on January 19 circulated to his Cabinet colleagues a draft bill which contained the following principal provisions: 1. An alien convicted of an offence was to be considered liable to expulsion. 2. Penalties for harbouring illegal immigrants to be increased. 3. Aliens to require special permission to carry fire-arms. He

L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Evening Journal; and General Henry Eugene Davies, who wrote a pamphlet, Ten Days on the Plains, describing the hunt. Among the others rounding out the group were Leonard W. and Lawrence R. Jerome; General Anson Stager of the Western Union Telegraph Company; Colonel M. V. Sheridan, the general's brother; General Charles Fitzhugh; and Colonel Daniel H. Rucker, acting quartermaster general and soon to be Phil Sheridan's father-in-law. Leonard W. Jerome, a financier, later became the grandfather of Winston Churchill when his second daughter, jenny, married Lord Randolph Churchill. The party arrived at Fort McPherson on September 22, 1871. The New York Herald's first dispatch reported: "General Sheridan and party arrived at the North Platte River this morning, and were conducted to Fort McPherson by General Emery [sic], commanding. General Sheridan reviewed the troops, consisting of four companies of the Fifth Cavalry. The party start[s] across the country tomorrow, guided by the renowned Buffalo Bill and under the escort of Major Brown, Company F, Fifth Cavalry. The party expect[s] to reach Fort Hays in ten days." After Sheridan's review of the troops, the general introduced Buffalo Bill to the guests and assigned them to their quarters in large, comfortable tents just outside the post, a site christened Camp Rucker. The remainder of the day was spent entertaining the visitors at "dinner and supper parties, and music and dancing; at a late hour they retired to rest in their tents." The officers of the post and their ladies spared no expense in their effort to entertain their guests, to demonstrate, perhaps, that the West was not all that wild. The finest linens, glassware, and china the post afforded were brought out to grace the tables, and the ballroom glittered that night with gold braid, silks, velvets, and jewels. Buffalo Bill dressed for the hunt as he had never done before. Despite having retired late, "at five o'clock next morning . . . I rose fresh and eager for the trip, and as it was a nobby and high-toned outfit which I was to accompany, I determined to put on a little style myself. So I dressed in a new suit of buckskin, trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same material; and I put on a crimson shirt handsomely ornamented on the bosom, while on my head I wore a broad sombrero. Then mounting a snowy white horse-a gallant stepper, I rode down from the fort to the camp, rifle in hand. I felt first-rate that morning, and looked well." In all probability, Louisa Cody was responsible for the ornamentation on his shirt, for she was an expert with a needle. General Davies agreed with Will's estimation of his appearance that morning. "The most striking feature of the whole was ... our friend Buffalo Bill.... He realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains." Here again Cody appeared as the

Philosophy cannot convince the bullet.

I am 25 today—it is terrible to think how little time remains!

There has of course always been a noisy pacifist or nationalist element in Britain who are ready to traduce the conduct of their fellow countrymen who are helping to fight their country’s battles. Naturally, being silly billies they know nothing of the traditions of the British Army nor in their passionate hatred of their own country do they mind what lies they tell.

Throughout June 13 Churchill worked at No. 10 Annexe on his second broadcast, helped first by his son-in-law Duncan Sandys, and then by his son Randolph.123 During his speech, as his daughter Sarah had suggested, Churchill elaborated on the Four-Year Plan. ‘I announced

And the great Liberal party which in 1882 was vigorous, united, supreme, is shrunk to a few discordant factions of discredited faddists, without numbers, without policy, without concord, without cohesion, around whose necks is bound the millstone of Home Rule. Indeed,

The First Lord’s early plans met obstruction from the Treasury, particularly when he had to come out in the open and ask for an Air Department at the Admiralty. Up to then he had relied, as he has told us, on ‘various shifts and devices’. In all, he was rebuffed three times before he could get Treasury sanction for this modest but far-sighted proposal.

I vividly recall an occasion when the oldest son was starting to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on to his lap. I can't imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture - on the part of R. Churchill, I mean, not of the son.

The harshest verdict on the biography came from the White House. ‘I dislike the father and dislike the son,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Randolph and Winston possessed ‘such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants’, thought ‘TR’, and Winston’s book was ‘A clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar egoist.

As he grew up, Winston Churchill persuaded himself that his father’s career afforded an inspiration; it should have offered a warning. Lord Randolph’s contemporaries wondered whether he was a brilliant but thwarted statesman, or an impetuous adventurer and something of a mountebank, undone by his lack of judgement so that he threw away golden chances. These were the very apprehensions Winston’s own contemporaries would so often feel about him: gifted but wayward and headstrong; energetic but overbearing and troublesome.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, into the influential and aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer-Churchill family, in the closely knit inner circle of Victorian society. Winston S. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a direct descendent of John Churchill, the man who became first Duke of Marlborough early in the eighteenth century after fighting for king and country against Louis XIV of France during the War of Spanish Succession.

When Napoleon crossed the Rhine, the German princes panicked, knowing that Napoleon's first goal was the confiscation of their wealth. As a result, the Prince of Hesse-Cassel gave his gold to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who then sent it out of the country, to his son Nathan, who was living in London. Having inside information about Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Nathan made a fortune by using the Prince of Hesse-Cassel's gold to speculate on the British consol. As a result, he became the richest man in England. Over the course of the next century, the Rothschild family and other Jewish usurers used that wealth to enslave the English aristocracy with debt. The most prominent example was the Churchill family. When Winston Churchill's father died, he was 60,000 pounds in debt to Natty Rothschild. By forgiving Randolph's debt, Natty Rothschild made his son Winston a pawn of Jewish interests, a fact which led indirectly to World War

When Winston Churchill's father died, he was 60,000 pounds in debt to Natty Rothschild. By forgiving Randolph's debt, Natty Rothschild made his son Winston a pawn of Jewish interests, a fact which led indirectly to World War

Jennie Jerome is Lady Randolph Churchill.

The separation of lovers delights the heart of the biographer.

Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Pankhurst, Lady Astor—all of them affiliated with the Tories. Sometimes, as I would later learn, Michael would go into contorted arguments to support those he liked even when they manifestly stood for views opposite to his own.

Much had happened to Churchill in the interval between these two speeches. In January 1895 his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at the age of forty-five from a degenerative illness, possibly syphilis,

For Free Trade or against it! There is no halfway house for timid retaliators to shelter in…. This North-West division of Manchester… is mainly Unionist rather than Liberal, and it is only by the absolutely straight voting of every Free Trade Unionist that the election of the Free Trade candidate, Mr Winston Churchill, can be assured. This, no doubt, means some sacrifices. We do not agree with Mr Churchill on all points; we do not approve of everything he has said—but I hope no Free Trade Unionist will allow any personal feeling on such points to prevent him from supporting in this election the great cause of Free Trade, of which Mr Churchill is a most able and courageous champion.

The Duke of Devonshire had recently made an important speech in favour of Free Trade at Rawtenstall. Churchill went on in his letter: ‘Fancy The Times boycotting the old Duke’s speech. What blackguards the Protectionist Press are.’ He was a little naïve at this time about the habits of the Press from The Times downwards.

At this there was a great uproar. Mr Churchill asked that the woman should come to the platform, and this she proceeded to do. The audience hissed her vigorously, and the complacent smile with which she regarded them in return appeared to cause still more irritation. The Chairman made her sit down on a vacant chair and Mr Churchill appealed again for order. ‘Will everybody’, he said, ‘be quiet. Let us hear what she has to say.

I admit I did say so and I admit that it was a very stupid thing to have said. I said a lot of stupid things when I was in the Conservative Party, and I left them because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.

Thirty-five years later Stanley Baldwin was to attack some left-wing members of the Tory Party, such as Harold Macmillan and Robert Boothby, when they were associating rather closely with Lloyd George, for ‘hunting with packs other than their own’. The Hooligans could have been attacked on similar grounds. Such records as survive seem to suggest that they spent far more of their time with the right wing of the Liberal Party than they did with their Tory colleagues.

Neurosyphilis isn’t genetic. Yet we’ll see that Lord Randolph’s son Winston had a different mental illness, as did Winston’s daughter Diana, who had a major depressive episode in 1952 and committed suicide in 1963 by barbiturate overdose (despite being active in suicide prevention efforts). Churchill’s first cousin, called “Sunny,” also suffered severe depressive episodes throughout his life. Thus we find a familial

For the English aristocracy, the horse was a symbol of social, political, and economic dominance. Those who rode and those who owned horses viewed society as composed of “a small, select aristocracy, booted and spurred to ride, and a large, dim mass, born, saddled and bridled to be ridden.”5 At Eton, Randolph