Top 55 William Manchester Quotes
#1. I was at a book convention, in a cab. On one side of me was Arthur Schlesinger; on the other side was William Manchester - real heavyweights. All they were doing was asking me about Charles Manson. The only thing that enables me not to be bored is the people talking about it - they're so interested.
Vincent Bugliosi
#2. 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
#3. There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.
William Manchester
#4. 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
#5. The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.
William Manchester
#6. Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
William Manchester
#7. It is the definition of an egoist that whatever occupies his attention is, for that reason, important.
William Manchester
#8. They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood.
William Manchester
#9. 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
#10. The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.
William Manchester
#11. His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them.
William Manchester
#12. The truth is so precious," Churchill told Stalin, "that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.
William Manchester
#13. He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.
William Manchester
#14. Let me first assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
William Manchester
#15. Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.
William Manchester
#16. there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.
William Manchester
#17. The shortest way out of Manchester is notoriously a bottle of Gordon's gin.
William Bolitho
#18. Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
William Manchester
#19. The heart of the other quotation, from Lincoln, was: "If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, these shops might as well be closed to any other business. I do the very best I know how, and I mean to keep doing so to the end.
William Manchester
#20. The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.
William Manchester
#21. I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.
William Manchester
#22. The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.
William Manchester
#23. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys.
William Manchester
#25. When I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth.
William Manchester
#26. 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
#28. But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.
William Manchester
#29. An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.
William Manchester
#30. Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams - but it never builds.
William Manchester
#31. If Peking wasn't stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as "the military colossus of the East." U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world's new nations would gravitate toward neutralism.
William Manchester
#32. patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue.
William Manchester
#33. I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.
William Manchester
#34. It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err.
William Manchester
#35. His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.
William Manchester
#36. I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
William Manchester
#37. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. "It makes no difference," Winston replied wryly. "The dead bird doesn't leave the nest.
William Manchester
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)
William Manchester
#43. As she sallied forth from her boudoir, you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.
William Manchester
#44. Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.
William Manchester
#45. Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.
William Manchester
#46. Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be swiftly followed by the lightening bolt of effect.
William Manchester
#47. A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.
William Manchester
#49. 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
#50. was an eighth cousin of Churchill, and a sixth cousin, once removed, of FDR - and three of World War II's great leaders were thus linked by American intermarriages.
William Manchester
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.
William Manchester
#54. I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull up tonight's darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace evermore.
William Manchester
#55. Biographer diagnoses reaction to restriction as a tell of true character. Some use even prison as a time of reflection and planning. Others, like Churchill, quickly chafe at missing interaction and opportunity.
William Manchester
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top