Winston Churchill Quotes

I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.

I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.

All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.

At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.

Terrour ... makes short warres

Anyone who's not military knows this fact. Why do you use chemical weapons while you're advancing ?

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

If we engage in a conflict that we know this is a threat to America, we should make it so one-sided that it gets over very quickly.

Saddam Hussein has openly admitted to the rest of the world that he had weapons of mass destruction. He used those weapons to kill his own people.

Under Saddam Hussein, the nation of Iraq possessed and used chemical weapons against both their own Kurdish population and Iranian military forces.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Is it really more barbaric to be killed by chemicals than by “legitimate” weapons?

In general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.

I do not contend that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect. But warfare is never pleasant... would you rather be temporarily deranged... by a chemical agent, or burned alive...?

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

… the war which began on August 1st, 1914, was the greatest crime against humanity and the freedom of peoples that any nation, calling itself civilized, has ever consciously committed. For many years the rulers of Germany, true to the Prussian tradition, strove for a position of dominance in Europe. They were not satisfied with that growing prosperity and influence to which Germany was entitled, and which all other nations were willing to accord her, in the society of free and equal peoples. They required that they should be able to dictate and tyrannize to a subservient Europe, as they dictated and tyrannised over a subservient Germany. Germany's responsibility, however, is not confined to having planned and started the war. She is no less responsible for the savage and inhuman manner in which it was conducted. The Germans they deliberately carried out a series of promiscuous shootings and burnings with the sole object of terrifying the inhabitants into submission by the very frightfulness of their action. They were the first to use poisonous gas, notwithstanding the appalling suffering it entailed. They began the bombing and long distance shelling of towns for no military object, but solely for the purpose of reducing the morale of their opponents by striking at their women and children. They commenced the submarine campaign with its piratical challenge to international law, and its destruction of great numbers of innocent passengers and sailors, in mid ocean, far from succour, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, and the yet more ruthless submarine crews. They drove thousands of men and women and children with brutal savagery into slavery in foreign lands. They allowed barbarities to be practiced against their prisoners of war from which the most uncivilized people would have recoiled.

The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible.

Psychochemical warfare has the advantage of avoiding the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.

Let me be clear. The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons, is a moral obscenity.

Poison gas meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner and thus reduce the number of casualties.

A counter-insurgency is won by intelligence—not by bombardment.

There is no entity in the world that will dare attack Israel with chemical weapons.

People have a good reason to be afraid of tear gas, considering it's a banned agent of war under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. Here's the catch - there's a clause in the treaty that includes an exception for domestic use. Yes, it's illegal for the U.S. military to use tear gas against ISIS, but cool to use against American citizens.