"I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns"
About this Quote
The line works because it treats aesthetics as morality without fully committing to the sermon. “I rejoice” and “genuinely sorry” are feelings we reserve for victories and tragedies, smuggled into a conversation about pigments. That exaggeration is the joke, but also the subtext: Churchill understood that people don’t simply “prefer” things; they recruit preferences into identity. Bright colors become a proxy for energy, confidence, even optimism. “Poor browns” aren’t just dull; they’re socially demoted, objects of pity. He’s dramatizing how easily our sensory hierarchies turn into value judgments.
Context sharpens the irony. Churchill’s era was steeped in ideas about taste as class signal, and his own persona prized vividness: bold rhetoric, bold imagery, bold self-myth. The sentence doubles as self-portrait. He’s confessing a temperament that dislikes drab compromise and reaches instinctively for saturation, for contrast, for the kind of clarity that reads as conviction. Even in color theory, he’s campaigning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime (1921) — passage discussing colours in the short essay; commonly cited from the 1921 published edition. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Churchill, Winston. (2026, January 15). I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-pretend-to-be-impartial-about-the-27773/
Chicago Style
Churchill, Winston. "I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-pretend-to-be-impartial-about-the-27773/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-cannot-pretend-to-be-impartial-about-the-27773/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.



