Winston Churchill Air Quotations

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy's aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.

I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.

Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.

For the first time I heard shots fired in anger, heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.

Air power can either paralyze the enemy's military action or compel him to devote to the defense of his bases and communications a share of his straitened resources far greater that what we need in the attack.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

Not to have an adequate air force in the present state of the world is to compromise the foundations of national freedom and independence.

Air power is the most difficult of military force to measure or even express in precise terms.