The political history of the 20th century can be written as the biographies of six men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The first four were totalitarians who made or used revolutions to create monstrous dictatorships. Roosevelt and Churchill differed from them in being democrats. And Churchill differed from Roosevelt — while both were war leaders, Churchill was uniquely stirred by the challenge of war and found his fulfillment in leading the democracies to victory.

Winston Churchill was the son of conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife, Jennie Jerome, and a direct descendant from the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). Lady Randolph’s second son, Jack, was born in 1880, and rumors circulated that he had a different father from Winston Churchill. “George Moore, the Anglo-Irish novelist, said she had 200 lovers, but apart from anything else the number is suspiciously round,” Roy Jenkins wrote in his biography on Churchill. “I loved her dearly — but at a distance,” Churchill later said of his mother in MY EARLY LIFE (1930). In school Churchill was at the bottom of his class. Nothing showed that he would became “the largest human being of our time” (Isaiah Berlin). Physically he was not a big man - at 5-foot-8 he was shorter than Harry Truman. Churchill attended Harrow and Sandhurst, from which he graduated twentieth in a class of 130. Shortly after his father’s death in 1895, he was commissioned in the Fourth Hussars. He soon obtained a leave, and worked during the Cuban war as a reporter for the London Daily Graphic.

“It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.” (from The Malakand Field Force)

If you are interested in reading a more complete biography of Sir Winston Churchill, head over to the Wikipedia page.

Now, do you remember the article in which I wrote that we exist in the future, that we can’t live *now*? Because we live in the future, it means that our present actions stem from, or are directed towards:

• Future worries
• Future plans

The following words by Sir Winston Churchill hold a truly important lesson in this regard. Engrave them into your mind.

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