It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston ChurchillRead
A study of Disease-of Pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast-is certainly being pursue in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies but whole districts - such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.
Interpretation
The quote addresses the troubling advancements in military science that involve using diseases as weapons.
Winston Churchill highlights the alarming trend in military science where various diseases are being weaponized to inflict harm on both humans and animals. He reflects on the ethical implications of research focused on creating blights, anthrax, and plagues for military purposes, raising concerns about the destructive potential such advancements hold for society and the natural world.
In practice
During a debate on ethical military practices, one might quote Churchill to illustrate the dangers of biological warfare.
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
The United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lit under it, there's no limit to the power it can generate.
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism.
Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?
People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.
Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.
You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.
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