Affirming Quote by Winston Churchill

“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor. The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading. When I was nine and a half my father gave me Treasure Island, and I remember the delight with which I devoured it. My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.” – My Early Life (1930)

In a letter to his mother, arguing against even one hour of tutoring a day in his summer holidays: “I shall feel that I have got to be back at a certain time and it would hang like a dark shadow over my pleasure.” – quoted in Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

“I hope that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some -- even in these modern days – who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”