Top 1200 World War Two Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

After 9-11, the President had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead, by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests, President Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

I mean that two of any thing is a most uncomfortable number. One may do as he pleases. Six may get along well enough. But two must always struggle for mastery. Two must always watch each other. The eyes of all the world will be on two, uncertain which of them to follow.

But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the asperities of national hostility. Davy's remarks to Thomas Poole on accepting Napoleon's prize for the best experiment on Galvanism.

Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

Gosh, I think faith is a wonderful thing. And I even think religion's a wonderful thing. I know a lot of people want to say, 'Religion's the only reason that man has had any trouble at all,' but you know what? World War I and World War II were not fought because of religious reasons.

So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

You have not been mistaken in supposing my views and feeling to be in favor of the abolition of war. Of my dispos[i]tion to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself, the world has had proofs, and more, perhaps, than it has approved. I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the dispos[i]tion to war; but of its abolition I despair.

Further, it would take one of those impossible coincidences that the Modern Liberal relies on so heavily to explain how it is that the two most religious nations in the Western World - the United States and Israel - are also arguably the world's two most scientifically and technologically advanced.

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

I want to take my American friends back to the end of World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was formulated. A group of thinkers met to come up with ways and means to prevent yet another war. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt played a crucial role in assembling this group of people. And that is why the name of the United States is synonymous with the cause of human rights around the world.

As you look back in history, we [the United States] have done wonderful things, the Marshal Plan is the most obvious. After World War II, we spent billions of dollars to rebuild Europe or at least part of Europe after the devastation of World War II. We did it out of charity, but we also did it to keep the Russians from getting deeply into Europe.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

My father fought behind Japanese lines in the second world war and it traumatised him. Everybody who knew him from before said he was the life and soul of the party - fun to be with - but after the war he was different.

I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight from the ruling class, but I will not wait to be commanded to fight for the working class. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.

War is a barbaric tool of the war profiteers and Empires who employ them. War pits young people from the working class against other similarly poor, or disadvantaged humans, for nothing but the greed of the few. Only we the people can make war obsolete by not participating in the profound crimes of the profiteers and other war mongers.

Of pure poetry there are two kinds, that which mirrors the beauty of the world in which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to the darkness from Xanadu.

The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.

In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly.

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since... I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.

I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.

War takes people's lives and destroys property, but it does not resolve the world's problems. If anything is achieved through war, it is to plant the seeds for the next violent conflict as the vanquished and their children will usually not accept the outcome.

[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.

I've always written towards movies that take place across two worlds. Most of the movies that I've worked on take place in two worlds, or sometimes three worlds, where you have a normal world and a fantasy world that mix and overlap. I never shy away from the series stuff in the real world. Big Fish is about mortality.

I played in bombed-out houses and grew up with the ever-present consequences of a lost war and the awareness that my own country had inflicted terrible pain on many nations during the horrific World War II.

The world will continue to change dramatically, but fighting and war can destroy us utterly. What we need now are techniques of harmony, not those of contention. The Art of Peace is required, not the Art of War.

Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

Was it proof of madness in the first corps of sea officers to have, at so critical a period, launched out on the ocean with only two armed merchant ships, two armed brigantines, and one armed sloop, to make war against such a power as Great Britain?

In Finland, we learned quite a lot from our own civil war. The wounds were visible when I was a boy, but my generation went into the Second World War and it united the Finnish nation, so I do not see any more wounds.

Whenever you have a war, the civilians and the innocents will pay the price. That's in any war, any war is a bad war.

War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually - and among them many African-American - migrated to the Hampton Roads area because of the job boom that was happening. It was a place where you could get stable war jobs.

In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

The power of one! If I can't stop war in my life, how can I expect politicians to stop war in the world? I can't. And we all have equal wisdom, so if I can do it then I know that anyone can do it if their mind is open to answering just four simple questions and beginning there.

When you have war, whether it's a war against drugs, war against terrorism, war overseas, the mentality of the people change and they're more willing to sacrifice their liberties in order to be safe and secure.

The difficult child is the child who is unhappy. He is at war with himself; and in consequence, he is at war with the world.

I only take vitamin B complex. Before World War II, I used to take ionized yeast, because in the pre-war era we never heard about vitamins.

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 don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.

It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.

We can see beyond the present shadows of war in the Middle East to a new world order where the strong work together to deter and stop aggression. This was precisely Franklin Roosevelt's and Winston Churchill's vision for peace for the post-war period.

If the workers of this world, men and women, decide not to manufacture and transport ammunition, it would end war for all time. We must do that. Dedicate our lives to drying up the source of war; ammunition factories.

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game.

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

With all of the history of war, and the human race's history unfortunately has been a good deal more war than peace, with nuclear weapons distributed all through the world, and available, and the strong reluctance of any people to accept defeat, I see the possibility in the 1970's of the President of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons.

I'm unhappy with the President Trump. I don't like his behavior, and I'm a Republican, and I don't like his policies because they're almost the antithesis of the American character of generosity, of charity, of welcoming, of helping, of taking risks. You think of the lives that were expended in World War I and World War II to help others, and they say now we'll draw up the bridge and we'll protect ourselves. We won't have a broader role in humanity.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

I consider Bush's decision to call for a war against terrorism a serious mistake. He is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies, and one cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning.