Earliest appearance in English was a 2001 foreword to a reprint of the 1938 book "Propaganda in the Next War". Sometimes it is claimed erroneously that the quote comes from a 1960 autobiography called "Winston Churchill - The Second World War" or that Churchill wrote it in a letter to Robert Boothby.
• The quote seems to have spread first in German, then in English. In German, the quote appeared in right-wing extremist circles in the mid-90s, possibly for the first time in 1995 in the far-right weekly newspaper "Der Schlesier".
• In German: »Das unverzeihliche Verbrechen Deutschlands vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war der Versuch, seine Wirtschaftskraft aus dem Welthandelssystem herauszulösen und ein eigenes Austauschsystem zu schaffen, bei dem die Weltfinanz nicht mehr mitverdienen konnte«
“

Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an own exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit anymore.

— Winston Churchill

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an own exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit anymore." in the context of "Earliest appearance in English was a 2001 foreword to a reprint of the 1938 book "Propaganda in the Next War". Sometimes it is claimed erroneously that the quote comes from a 1960 autobiography called "Winston Churchill - The Second World War" or that Churchill wrote it in a letter to Robert Boothby.
• The quote seems to have spread first in German, then in English. In German, the quote appeared in right-wing extremist circles in the mid-90s, possibly for the first time in 1995 in the far-right weekly newspaper "Der Schlesier".
• In German: »Das unverzeihliche Verbrechen Deutschlands vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war der Versuch, seine Wirtschaftskraft aus dem Welthandelssystem herauszulösen und ein eigenes Austauschsystem zu schaffen, bei dem die Weltfinanz nicht mehr mitverdienen konnte«" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Winston Churchill" (Misattributed) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed February 05, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

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Winston Churchill

About Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG OM CH TD FRS PC (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was a Sandhurst-educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, though he was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.