A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.
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My parents, like others of "The Greatest Generation" who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, wanted to provide the best possible life for their children. My mother and father both attended college but dropped out to earn a living during the Depression, working the rest of their lives at blue-collar work.
I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go... It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'
For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.
The distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money, in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.
I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.
There is a myth that the New Deal programs on their own pulled the US out of the Great Depression and created the conditions for the economic boom after World War II. As an economist, I can tell you, that is not true. In reality, it was mainly World War II that launched the boom - the massive war mobilization, the horrifying destruction and death caused by it, and then the reconstruction in its aftermath. he US was the only advanced capitalist country that was not bombed during the war.
My dad was a member of the Greatest Generation that achieved victory in World War II. This was the generation that saved the world from fascism, came home and built the great American middle class, led the way in the civil rights movement, protected our environment, and created great programs like Medicare.
We are a resilient country. We've been through a Civil War; we've been through two World Wars. We've been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!
I urge all Connecticut residents to reflect on the sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation during World War II. In the aftermath of tragedy, they came together in the name of justice, humanity, and democracy, and each of us has benefitted from their service. We will be always grateful for everything they have provided to the United States.
It's just person after person in every different country that has a life that I can’t even imagine and has gone through horror that I can’t even imagine.
Because of [Amelia Earhart], we had more women available to fly in the 1940's to help us get through World War II. And because of these women, women of my generation are able to look back and say, 'Hey, they did it. They even flew military airplanes, we can do it, too.'
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
Some of the greatest stuff that I watch, that I'm drawn to, is deeply flawed human beings, because they're representing a part of us that might not be all of us but the part we're most afraid to look at, and so we get to vicariously experience it through this character.
In the US after the Great Depression, they invested heavily in infrastructure to create a lot of employment. In Germany after the war there was the Marshall plan for roads, rail, housing, energy, water and so on. That created massive employment after the devastation of the war and helped them to rebuild the country.
So let the mind flow like water. Face life with a calm and quiet mind and everything in life will be calm and quiet.
When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry.
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