A Quote by Michael Portillo

For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.

Michael Portillo

Quote Topics

Civil Civil War Devastating Experienced Spanish Spanish Civil War Those War

Quote Author

Michael Portillo
British - Journalist
Born: May 26, 1953

There was so much going on in 1936 with the height of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War and Germany on the move and all of those things. There was a tension in the air.

Matt Bomer

During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war.

Stephen Kinzer

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

Nicholas D. Kristof

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

Colm Toibin

My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.

Michael Portillo

... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

Gertrude Stein

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

Nancy Gibbs

Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], and it was, by far, the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever joined somebody else's civil war. I think they were primarily people who were deeply alarmed by the menace of fascism. They saw this on the horizon. I quote one volunteer, Maury Colow of New York, who said, "for us it was never Franco, it was always Hitler."

Adam Hochschild

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

Adam Hochschild

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

Howard Fast

We have to make a really cold judgement. Would the consequence of civil war be more devastating than the consequences of staying the course?.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

George Packer

I lived in an atmosphere where Mama brought 60 Basque refugee children to England during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

Richard Attenborough

And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.