Crisis Archives - Sam Luce

Never Waste A Crisis

4 Comments / March 14, 2020

Machiavelli first said, “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.” In the modern era, this sentiment has been wrongfully attributed to Winston Churchill (as I had done as well the first time I posted this blog post.) It was Rahm Emanuel who popularized Machiavelli for this generation by saying “You never want a […]

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4 responses to “Never Waste A Crisis”

Charles

March 12, 2020

Your claim that Winston Churchill said, “never let a good crisis go to waste”, or any other closely worded quotation is absolutely, and utterly untrue! There has never been one single source to back up the claim that he ever uttered words even somewhat close to those words. This has been researched ad nauseam by experts on Churchill including, to name a few, WinstonChurchill.org, the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge, and author Richard Landworth (an expert on Churchill with at least 12 published books, founder of the Churchill Study Unit, and current Senior Fellow for the Churchill Project at Hillsdale College to name a few of his credentials). EVERYONE that has researched this claim has not found one piece of evidence. The only “evidence” is articles, such as yours, that claim the quote is true but provide no supporting evidence or source references. Lie enough and it becomes true; am I right? It has, however, been attributed to page 89 of Saul Alinsky’s Rule for Radicals and Rahm Emanuel. If you disagree and still insist what you said is not a lie, I suggest you post references and sources to your claim. If you can, you’ll have done what no other expert on Winston Churchill has been able to do.

samluce

March 13, 2020

Charles, I did further research as you suggested and you are right I will fix this post so it no longer mentions Winston Churchill. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.

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Kim Simmons

July 31, 2020

I was just sitting down to write a letter to our church families about what “not letting this crisis go to waste” might look like for a Christian and discovered you had written this great post. Thank you for referencing Kent Hughes commentary, I may need to share that too!

samluce

August 11, 2020

Kim, Thanks for you comment. I love Kent Hughes he has the head of a theologian and the heart of a pastor something you don’t always find.

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