He led Britain out of World War II, his policies led to the Bengal famine of 1943. He made speeches that would rouse the most dispirited men and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, yet, he was also a racist, capable of making comments like 'Indians are a beastly people with a beastly religion'. Such is the personality of Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who passed away on January 24, 1965.
While in the UK and Europe, Churchill is hailed as a wartime leader, in other countries his flaws of being a white supremacist are more apparent. In the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests, the statue of Winston Churchill in Central London was targeted.
Other controversial claims associated with the British statesman are that he used chemical weapons and he further stated that he was, "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes". Not only has he denounced Mahatma Gandhi again and again, calling him "seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir", his attitude towards Jews, the religion of Islam and even unions was questionable, to say the least.
And yet, he has given us some quotes like:
- The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes
- Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts
- You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life
- Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
