Never, Never, Never Give In

Winston Churchill uttered those words on the 29th of October 1941, during the darkest days of World War II, when England for more than two years had been fighting the Nazi war machine alone, in a speech at the public school he attended as a boy, Harrow School just outside of Central London.

He referred to England’s fight for survival in these words:

Never yield to force, never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

On June 4, 1940. After France had fallen and the British Expeditionary Force had to withdraw by sea from Dunkirk to escape capture, Churchill addressed the House of Commons in the following words that mobilized the nation:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world.

No one who worked with Churchill remained indifferent to his charisma. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's essential partner in strategy and most severe critic in private, wrote in his diary, I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally supermen exist on this earth.'

Some people have called Churchill a racist. warmonger. and mass murderer.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, he was responsible for the Gallipoli disaster (1915) and may have been responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania ( to turn America against Germany and draw her into the war.).

Churchill held many high political offices. He was also a talented painter and great writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953 for his multivolume work on the history of World War I and II.

Churchill is also famous for coining the word iron curtain in a speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, in which he charged the Soviet Union with dividing Europe and starting the Cold War.

He made the speech as the leader of the opposition because his countrymen had just voted him out of office. Gratitude has amnesia.

Here’s one of my favorite sayings of Churchill:

Success is going from one failure to another without losing your enthusiasm.

Obama removed the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, but Trump restored it

So what does never giving in really mean? It means believing in yourself. It means the willingness to accept “failure” so you can learn the critical skill of adaptation. It means not compromising on your most important values, We are bound to fail if we tackle something that is far beyond us. A weakling cannot aspire to be an Olympic weightlifter, but most things in life are just beyond our reach. If we follow Churchill’s advice, we can accomplish a lot, even if we are not geniuses.

The example of Churchill also suggests that we should read biographies. There are so many good ones about famous people that it is impossible to make a recommendation.

An excellent biography of Churchill (there are thousands) is the book by Andrew Roberts, which has forty new sources and does not whitewash Churchill.

I should mention the dusty old book of Plutarch about the Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans and Alban Butler’s The Lives of the Saints.

I enjoyed the biographies of Emil Ludwig of Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lincoln.

I don’t have time to reach such a long book, someone might object to one of my recommendations.

You do have the time, or rather you should make the time to study the lives of great people.

TV-viewing did not fade out with the advent of the Internet and the Smart Phone. On the contrary, in 2010 the average American households watched TV for an astonishing 8 hours and 55 minutes per day. Think of all that time wasted that could be put to better use.

A good book to start with would be Emerson’s Representative Men, seven essays on such great men as Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, and others.

Marcus Aurelius in Meditations says that in the study lives of the greats and not-nearly-so-greats we come to know what a good life looked like, learn from the experiences of earlier generations, and understand why contentment, justice, and kindness are so important (and the perils of the opposite traits).

So make a commitment today to watch less television and start reading biographies as an important step on the way to wisdom.