Blood, toil, tears, and sweat

The phrase "blood, toil, tears and sweat" became famous in a speech given by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 13 May 1940.

This was Churchill's first speech on 13 May 1940 to the House of Commons after having been offered the King's commission the previous Friday, to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the first year of World War II. Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain on 10 May, and in this speech he asked the House to declare its confidence in his Government. The motion passed unanimously. This was the first of three speeches which he gave during the period of the Battle of France, which commenced on 10 May.

Churchill had used similar phrases earlier, as "Their sweat, their tears, their blood" in 1931 and "new structures of national life erected upon blood, sweat, and tears".

Churchill's sentence, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat," has been called a paraphrase of one uttered on 2 July 1849 by Giuseppe Garibaldi when rallying his revolutionary forces in Rome: "I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death." As a young man, Churchill had considered writing a biography of Garibaldi.Theodore Roosevelt uttered a phrase similar to Churchill's in an address to the Naval War College on 2 June 1897, following his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy: "Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph." Churchill's line has been called a "direct quotation" from Roosevelt's speech. Churchill, a keen soldier, was likely to have read works by Theodore Roosevelt, who was a widely published military historian; it is also possible he read the speech after being appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a position similar to Roosevelt's.

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