[PW] Re: ? Winston Churchill Quotation

[Fred Shapiro]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Thornlow, Bruce wrote:

> The patron needs an exact source for this quotation, and I haven't been
> able to locate it.  One internet source from a British parliamentary
> member quotes it as coming from Lord Randolph Churchill.  But I don't
> trust it.

The noise and confusion of election crowds, the cant of phrase and 
formula, the burrowings of rival Caucuses, fill with weariness, and even 
terror, persons of exquisite sensibility. It is easy for those who take no 
part in the public duties of citizenship under a democratic dispensation 
to sniff disdainfully at the methods of modern politics and to console 
themselves for a lack of influence upon the course of events by the 
indulgence of a fastidious refinement and a meticulous consistency. But it 
is a poor part to play. Amid the dust and brawling, with rude weapons and 
often unworthy champions, a real battle for real and precious objects is 
swaying to and fro. Better far the clamour of popular disputation, with 
all its most blatant accessories, hammering out from month to month and 
year to year the laboured progress of the common people in a work-a-day 
world, than the poetic tragedies and violence of chivalric ages.
   Winston Churchill, _Lord Randolph Churchill_ (1907), pp. 243-44

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
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