Winston Churchill Quotes

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

Peace as a goal is an ideal which will not be contested by any government or nation, not even the most belligerent.

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

I care about politics just like any other citizen. I'm against the war in Iraq, or any type of war.

I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.

An army is a nation; it is one of the vices of our age.

To Perpetual Peace

If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us and only two soldiers.

Every nation prepares, through its government, to equip itself with the power to hurl death upon its fellow-nations. No people seeks that power; it is governments that seek it.

We will need ploughshares and swords.

The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war...And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

The founders of the United Nations sought to replace a world at war with a world of civilized order. They hoped that a world of relentless conflict would give way to a new era, one where freedom from violence prevailed.... But the awful truth is that the use of violence for political gain has become more, not less, widespread in the last decade.

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

My first wish is, to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements, and exercising them, for the destruction of mankind.

Without armaments peace cannot be kept; wars are waged not only to repel injustice but also to establish a firm peace.

Armies for the preservation of peace do not exist; they exist only for the triumphant exertion of war.

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars.