Quote of the Moment: Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech (encore)

March 5, 2013, is the 67th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri. He called the speech “Sinews of Peace,” but it is better known as the speech in which Churchill first used the phrase Iron Curtain to describe events in Eastern Europe after World War II.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

Sir Winston S. Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, titled “The Sinews of Peace.”

Some historians mark the beginning of the Cold War from this speech, in which a respected world leader first spelled out the enormous stakes at issue, and also pointed out that Russian, communist totalitarian governments were replacing more democratic governments in nations only recently freed from the spectre of Nazi rule, in World War II.

Last June son James and I stopped off in Fulton, on the way back from James’s graduation from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.  We were treated royally by the people at the Churchill Centre, and got a chance to spend time in what is really a first rate museum.  More people should make Fulton a destination, or pause in their summer travels, for the sake of the kids.

This is an encore post; with a bit of time free, I may post more photographs of our trip.

Oh, why not: Below the fold is the speech in its entirety, from the transcript at the Churchill Centre.

Birthday of Twain and Churchill: Happy Whiskey and Cigar Day 2012!

Mark Twain aboard a ship, somewhere. Place and photographer unknown (at least to MFB). Young Samuel Clemens apprenticed to be a Mississippi river boat pilot, and held a fascination for water-going vessels his entire life. His pilot years are documented, and analyzed, in Life on the Mississippi.

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

In 2012, we have the benefit of having had a couple of years to digest Twain’s Autobiography, and we have the benefit of new scholarship and a major new book on Churchill, William Manchester’s and Paul Reid’s The Last Lion.

Twain had a comment on the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

- Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson‘s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine. Churchill’s career was built much on his work as First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he took in 1911.  While he was the goat of the Battle of the Dardanelles (and had to resign as a result), his earlier work to switch Britain’s Navy to oil power from coal, and to use airplanes in combat, kept the British Navy as an important and modern military organization through World War II.

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.

Each possessed a great facility with words, and wit, and frequently said or wrote things that people like to remember and repeat again.

Both of them rank near the top of the list of people to whom almost any quote will be attributed if the quote is witty and the speaker can’t remember, or doesn’t know, who actually said it.

Both men are worth study. And wouldn’t you really love to have had them over to dinner?

Twain, on prisons versus education:

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49. (Obviously, and sadly, Churchill was wrong — twice wrong.)

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Quotations
• Mark Twain in His Time, University of Virginia (see especially the photo of Twain — with an electric light? — on the opening page)
• Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
• The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut
• Ain’t it great that we’ve finally got the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography this year?

More on Winston Churchill

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• Churchill Centre, London
• Churchill quotations, from the Churchill Centre
• National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri (an excellent place to visit, great resources for students)
• Washington Post review of The Last Lion

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

Yeah, mostly this is an encore post from past years.

More, contemporary reports from 2012:

• Ready for November 30? Humidor set? Liquor stocked? (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• On This Day In 1835, Mark Twain is Born (rememberinghistory.wordpress.com)
• OMG! First Use of Abbreviation Found in a 1917 Letter to Winston Churchill (newsfeed.time.com)
• HAPPY 177th BIRTHDAY MARK TWAIN! MARK TWAIN was a GENIUS American author, novelist, satirist and humorist, who is most famous for writing “The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” (greatkat.wordpress.com)
• Winston Churchill: The Ultimate CEO (greatfinds.icrossing.com)

Ready for November 30? Humidor set? Liquor stocked?

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens), and of Winston Spencer Churchill.

A good study of American history could be achieved merely in studying the chronicle of the lives of these two men, even though Churchill was British.  A good study of American history, or world history, cannot be had without familiarity with both of them, and why they are important.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives the “Victory” sign to crowds in London on Victory in Europe Day. Wikipedia image

Both were writers, of travelogues and geographical romps, of history, though Twain is chiefly known as a fiction writer.  Both were great humorists, often funny, often sharply witty with bon-mots that shone a highlight on some human foible or forgotten-but-shouldn’t-be point of history.

Both of them loved good whiskey, and a good cigar.

(I should have more to say about each of these men, especially having visited with Churchill in Wisconsin, Fulton, Missouri, and Washington, D.C., and with Twain in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, and Washington, D.C., in the past few months.  But I also will attend a funeral for a friend, and I will get a good night’s sleep; get a shot of whiskey, a good cigar if your cardiologist lets you have one on occasion, and toast them whether I write any more or not.)

So, how will you celebrate the anniversary of the births of Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, on November 30?

I wonder how they celebrate in Hannibal, and in Fulton?

Mark Twain was featured in an ad for Old Crow Whiskey, unknown year. Twain wrote, “Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.” (Autograph inscription in album to Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, reported in The Washington Post, June 11, 1881)

More:

• Why Winston Churchill will always be the last word in political wit (telegraph.co.uk)
• Winston Churchill’s family heirlooms go on show (itv.com)
• Review: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (macleans.ca)

Non-virtual world interference in the summer of 2012

Posting here takes hits every day from real world interference.  That interference will continue.

And it’s a pretty bad backlog.  I have stuff cued up, but needing editing, from stuff I saw in June.  Since June 1st I traveled by SUV from Texas to Wisconsin, and back, by air to Washington, D.C., and by car from Dallas to Colorado Springs and back.  I have not tallied how many states.

Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” address originated the term “Iron Curtain.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We saw and purchased parts of the Berlin Wall, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where a mockup of eight panels of the wall cut into a work of art by Winston Churchill’s granddaughter caught tourists’ eyes at the Trout Museum of Art, along with a display of Winston Churchill’s art — stuff he made, and stuff made about him.  With younger son James I drove to Fulton, Missouri, to see the actual chunks of the Berlin Wall at the Churchill Center in America.  A couple of weeks later I stood stunned by even more parts of the Berlin Wall, and one of the guard towers, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

[Nota bene:  "The Art of Winston Churchill" was extended through Septermber 7 at the Trout Museum of Art; if you're near Appleton, Wisconsin, go.]

We lucked into a tour of the museum at Fulton, the National Churchill Museum on the Churchill Center, which is housed under the oldest European building standing in America.  That building is a church originally built in about 1100 A.D., rescued by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great London Fire, bombed out with Nazi incendiary devices in the Battle of Britain, and then disassembled in London and reassembled and gloriously restored in Fulton, at the Churchill Center, near the site of Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College, as part of the American tribute to the Great Winston.

Between Appleton and Fulton, we stopped  in Springfield, Illinois, to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  It’s a stop I’ve made several times, including for seminars with the Bill of Rights Institute and Liberty Fund.  This time we drove to Lincoln’s tomb.  I had not realized that one could enter the tomb.  A bronze cast of Borglum’s  Lincoln bust stands in front of the tomb — Abe’s nose rubbed shiny by tens of thousands of touches.  Borglum’s bust remains one of my favorite sculptures.  The version in the U.S. Capitol, I discovered a few days later, has been moved from the grand view in the Rotunda, to the crypt below (replaced by a grinning, glad-handing Ronald Reagan!).  In the Capitol, no one is allowed to touch Abe’s nose.

In Washington I discovered that the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the FDR Memorial is much less guarded.  People there touch her hands.  FDR sits — in his wheelchair — a few yards away, with a much-larger-than-life statue of his fabled dog Fala.  It’s Fala’s ears that get the touches there.

A half mile away, the Korean War Memorial features nearly a score of bronze soldiers on patrol on a cold Korean morning.   Not in the original design, a small fence surrounds the patrol, enough of a barrier to keep people from walking up to the actual men portrayed and touching them — the Korean War Memorial was not designed for public interaction with statues that way.  Another hundred yards at the Vietnam War Memorial, and it’s difficult to find anyone who visits who does not touch the wall of names, 58,000 dead.

These memorials, if not touching themselves, certainly invite touching, and are touched.

In Colorado we camped with a Boy Scout troop from Aurora , Colorado — our camp included the night of the horrible shootings in Aurora.  That week saw an unusual, three-way swing of good deeds involving Scouts from Aurora, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Hurst, Texas, which I believe has not yet been told.    On the way to Colorado we stopped at the Oklahoma City Memorial to the victims of the bombing there; on the return, we visited Cadillac Ranch with what seemed like a hundred Kiwis and Aussies exploring our grand Route 66 — have you made that drive? — and the Kwahadi Indian Dancers who bravely revived the Ghost Dance, somehow without earning the ire of the 7th Cavalry.

A lot of asphalt under the wheels, a lot of clouds under the wings — but not a job under my belt.  I’ll post what I can, but other issues take time, as you might understand.

More:

• August 13, 1961: Berlin Wall (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Winston Churchill: The Ultimate CEO (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• Churchill versus his legend (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Letter to Winston Churchill May Contain First Known Use of ‘OMG’ (nymag.com)
• Romney: ‘Looking Forward to the Bust of Winston Churchill Being in the Oval Office Again’ (tammybruce.com) (President Obama thanked English Embassy for loan of Churchill bust after September 11, 2011; but Obama wished to put Americans back:  Lincoln and King.  WH has another Churchill bust, but Romney appears to think Lincoln and King are insulting to Americans.  Weird as hell.)
• Winston Churchill’s Customized Land Rover Is Going On Sale (businessinsider.com)

August 13, 1961: Berlin Wall

51 years ago today.

Soviet-bloc communism disabused us of a lot of ideas, including pointing out that when the amplification was turned up a lot, even Robert Frost could be wrong in the voice of his farmer and neighbor character, because high, concrete and concertina wire fences don’t make good neighbors.

A rock wall in Vermont, like the one Robert Frost wrote about -Wikimedia image

Of course, even in demonstrating Frost in error, the communists made the opening clause of “Mending Fences” more poignant: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . .”

Residents of Berlin awoke on August 13, 1961, to discover that the Soviet-dominated East Germany had begun constructing a wall across Berlin, to keep East Berlin residents from escaping the clutches of communism and walking to freedom in West Berlin.

This year I saw a mock up of part of the Berlin Wall next to an exhibit honoring Winston Churchill at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin.  A few days later I saw actual portions of the wall, mounted for permanent display at the National Churchill Museum on the Churchill Center in Fulton, Missouri.  A few days later, I saw more sections of the wall, with one of the 300+ guard towers, at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.  On Each occasion I was reminded of my own  trip to the Wall in 1987, finding next to the boarded-up Reichstag eight wreaths, honoring the eight people who were known to have died trying to cross the wall in the previous six months.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.  That something is freedom.

Please see other Bathtub posts on the topic:

• “Berlin Wall’s 50th anniversary”
• Berlin Wall’s 46th
• Berlin Wall’s 45th
• “Kennedy said we are all citizens of Berlin”
• Quote of the moment: John Kennedy, June 26, 1963
• Cold War hero Günter Schabowski
• “20 years ago the Berlin Wall fell — reverse domino effect” (November 9, 2009)

And remember the poet’s telling, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

A wall Robert Frost would not love – Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz, November 1975, from West Berlin – Wikimedia photo

Other resources:

• Great Divide: The Birth of the Berlin Wall (life.time.com)
• The Berlin Wall (socyberty.com)
• the wall (ourownsweettime.com)
• By 2023, most people will be too young to remember the Berlin Wall! (rightsaidjames.wordpress.com)
• Comic book on Germany’s painful past targets youth (gulfnews.com)
• Project to name victims killed at Cold War border (thelocal.de)
• Tear Down That Wall! (sarasmusings.wordpress.com)

Churchill versus his legend

Who is that kindly, chubby little man meant to represent? – 1954 cartoon by Michael Cummings, on the unveiling of a monumental portrait, a tribute to Winston Churchill. Churchill, the “roar to the lion” of the British people during World War II, was turned out of office after the war. Churchill’s personage seems dwarfed by his reputation, in the painting.  Cartoon from the collection of Churchill’s granddaughter, Edwina Standys.

Sometimes life doesn’t seem to measure up to its reputation.

At the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin, we caught the Winston Churchill exhibits, including this 1954 cartoon by Michael Cummings.

Churchill, the hero of Britain in World War II, lost his post as Prime Minister to his former aide, Clement Attlee, after the war.  Britons appeared to think Attlee better suited to lead the peace.  Tributes continued to pour in for Churchill, however.

Poking fun at the situation, to the amusement of Churchill himself, Cummings inked this cartoon on the unveiling of a great portrait to Churchill.  The larger-than-life painting dwarfed the real-life Churchill.

History does that sometimes.  The people who turn out as heroes, later on, seem so real, so non-heroic, and even small, in person.

One trick of living is to see the heroes under the small exteriors.

The Trout continues the exhibit through July 29, 2012.

P.S.:  The portrait by Graham Sutherland did not please Mr. Churchill a lot; so far as is known, it was destroyed on orders from Lady Churchill.

P.P.S.: In the first version of this post, for some unexplainable reason, I called the portrait “a statue.”  Fixed now.

More, and Related Articles:

• Winston Churchill: The Ultimate CEO (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• A new exhibition reveals Winston Churchill’s Irish connections (irishcentral.com)
• Sir Winston Churchill’s works to be sold as ebooks (telegraph.co.uk)
• Five things Winston Churchill can teach writers (billbennett.co.nz)
• Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill (coolhunting.com)
• WINSTON CHURCHILL, Harvard Minority. I had somehow forgotten that Winston Churchill’s grandmoth… (pjmedia.com)
• Successes in Rhetoric: Language in the Life of Churchill (nytimes.com)
• Quote of the Day: So Churchill (businessinsider.com)
• Best ever put-downs: 30 of the wittiest ways celebrities have insulted their rivals (mirror.co.uk)

 

Birthday of Twain and Churchill: Happy Whiskey and Cigar Day!

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

Twain had a comment on the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

- Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, andboth rebounded.

Each possessed a great facility with words, and wit, and frequently said or wrote things that people like to remember and repeat again.

Both of them rank near the top of the list of people to whom almost any quote will be attributed if the quote is witty and the speaker can’t remember, or doesn’t know, who actually said it.

Both men are worth study. And wouldn’t you really love to have had them over to dinner?

Twain, on prisons versus education:

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Quotations
• Mark Twain in His Time, University of Virginia (see especially the photo of Twain — with an electric light? — on the opening page)
• Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
• The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut
• Ain’t it great that we’ve finally got the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography this year?

More on Winston Churchill

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• Churchill Centre, London
• Churchill quotations, from the Churchill Centre

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

Yeah, mostly this is an encore post from past years.

Whiskey and Cigar Day, 2010: Mark Twain and Winston Churchill

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

Twain had a comment on the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

- Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.

Each possessed a great facility with words, and wit, and frequently said or wrote things that people like to remember and repeat again.

Both of them rank near the top of the list of people to whom almost any quote will be attributed if the quote is witty and the speaker can’t remember, or doesn’t know, who actually said it.

Both men are worth study.  And wouldn’t you really love to have had them over to dinner?

Twain, on prisons versus education:

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Quotations
• Mark Twain in His Time, University of Virginia (see especially the photo of Twain — with an electric light? — on the opening page)
• Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
• The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut
• Ain’t it great that we’ve finally got the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography this year?

More on Winston Churchill

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• Churchill Centre, London
• Churchill quotations, from the Churchill Centre

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

Yeah, mostly this is an encore post from past years.

Whiskey and Cigar Day 2008: Churchill and Twain

Encore Post:  From 2007; alas, things at the Texas State Board of Education have gotten no better.

November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), and Winston Churchill (1874).

Twain had a comment on recent actions at the Texas Education Agency:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.

- Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win a Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.

Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.

Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.

Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.

Both men are worth study.

Twain, on prisons versus education: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900

Churchill on the evil men and nations do:

“No One Would Do Such Things”

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.

Image of Twain aboard ship – origin unknown. Image of Winston S. Churchill, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1941, copyright 1941 by Time Magazine.

More on Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Quotations
• Mark Twain in His Time, University of Virginia (see especially the photo of Twain — with an electric light? — on the opening page)
• Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
• The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut

More on Winston Churchill

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• Churchill Centre, London
• Churchill quotations, from the Churchill Centre

Orson Welles, with Dick Cavett, on Churchill, his wit, humor and grace (tip of the old scrub brush to the Churchill Centre):

Quote of the Moment: Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

Sir Winston S. Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, titled “The Sinews of Peace.”

Some historians mark the beginning of the Cold War from this speech, in which a respected world leader first spelled out the enormous stakes at issue, and also pointed out that Russian, communist totalitarian governments were replacing more democratic governments in nations only recently freed from the spectre of Nazi rule, in World War II.

Oh, why not: Below the fold is the speech in its entirety, from the transcript at the Churchill Centre.