Top 76 WWII Quotes & Sayings

When I was writing my first book, 'In Harm's Way,' I witnessed the sense of sacrifice that those WWII veterans possessed. I was surprised that sometimes their grandchildren hadn't talked to them about the historic events of that night in July 1945, when the USS Indianapolis went down.

My dad and uncles were among the 125,000 proud black American volunteers who, throughout their entire lives, considered their decision to serve during WWII as their greatest honor.

If you want the human psyche, how we deal with humans in these situations, WWII is a very tangled place to go.

I'm going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I'd like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It's what I do.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

I have to admit that WWII France was not at all on my radar for Kristin Hannah.

Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.

WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.

An era that I specifically like is sort of late '50s, early '60s. I guess mid '50s, too. I like these types of films that deal with post-WWII America and this more complex leading man that kind of emerges from that.

All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.

Bernie Sanders is like those liberal members of the German National Socialist Party during the WWII, or of the Italian Fascist movement during Mussolini. They'd do much for their own workers and peasants, socially... as long as funds were flowing in from the countries plundered by their imperialism.

Bill Veeck was a charismatic and somewhat eccentric owner-fan during the post-WWII years.

The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow " For better or for worse--it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option

[For business after WWII ] democracy means getting people to regard government as an alien force that's robbing them and oppressing them, not as their government. In a democracy it would be your government.

An era that I specifically like is sort of late 50's, early 60's. I guess mid 50's too. I like these types of films that deal with post WWII America and this more complex leading man that kind of emerges from that.

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialisation, mechanisation, urbanisation and exploding population.

The big fun in Battleship is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is what the Japanese surrendered to...

We've been in the nation-building business since World War I, and especially since WWII. The goal is not a Jeffersonian Democracy in Afghanistan, but a representative government that respects human rights, protects its own people, and is a friend of the West. These are very realistic - and necessary - goals.

It's said that you can tell a lot about someone by who opposes them. In the case of liberal pundit Bill Maher - a man who called America's actions cowardly in the wake of 9/11 and who mocked WWII veterans who wanted to visit the monument built in their honor - I wear his disapproval of me as a badge of honor.

My father was a pilot in WWII and I have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who answers the call to serve our country.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

Longevity is something I never gave a second thought to. I guess it's the shadow of growing up in post WWII, but I never believed I would live past 20. Here I am though... a senior citizen... my voice and heart are stronger than ever, but boredom is the greatest enemy so I have to be careful not to slip over the edge.

No, I'm all man. I even fought in WWII. Of course, I was wearing women's undergarments under my uniform.

My grandfather served as a gunner aboard the U.S.S. Alabama in the Pacific theater during WWII.

Britain didn't win WWII by panicking. Let´s be bold, determined and stick to the best of values.

I'm obsessed with history, especially WWII and the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

To look back at history, during WWII, Rosie the Riveter and all that, when women needed to get to work, the US opened a LOT of daycare centers very fast. When we have the will, we do it; we're capable of doing these things. Continuing to raise awareness is important.

We don't know our hearts until life puts us to the test, and WWII fascinates because it was the last time everyone was simultaneously pushed to their limit.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

I grew up in Hollywood during WWII, and my mother was afraid that my father was going to be drafted because she didn't think we were going to be able to live on army pay. She didn't want to have to get a job, so she decided to put me to work, and that's how I got started in the movies.

I have a friend that is a WWII buff, and we sat and talked a lot about stuff like the war and the reasons behind it, and you now it's all in the uniform. Once you're in it, it usually does all the work for you.

Learning about WWII at the U.S. Naval Academy taught me about military tactics and the importance of fighting for our country's highest ideals.

It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.

I learned in grade-school that after WWII European politicians considered sending Jews to Madagascar instead of Palestine. At the time I thought: Madagascar would've been so great.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Thematically, we're both [with Kristin Hannah ] interested in women's experiences and women's stories, and until now, you've mostly dealt with how it feels to be a wife/mother/sister/name your poison in today's world. But this story [The Nightingale ] is told from the perspective of two sisters during the German occupation of France in WWII.

In the early 19th century, when the country was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial economy, we subsidised transportation and created a national bank. In the post-WWII era, we as a federal government made strategic investments in emerging technologies including microelectronics, telecommunications and biotechnology.

My hearing loss was essentially due to noise exposure during my military service. I was on an anti-submarine sub-chaser in WWII, and we had lots of depth charges going off all around us. There were plenty of explosions, and they were loud!

By...WWII, I.G. Farben had become...part of the most gigantic and powerful cartel of all history...interlocking agreements...over 2,000 of them...In the US, the cartel had established important agreements with

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

When WWII ended, the Cold War started, and the interest of the Western world was not to completely break Germany. So all those Nazis who had been controlling the country now had the power to rebuild it. I think there were many of them who just continued their life in society; it's a very known fact.

God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.

Sometimes, with leaders, the stakes are very high indeed. Churchill, in WWII, for example, could not afford to utter publicly his concerns about England's ability to survive Hitler's onslaught. He thought about them, but the leadership conversation sometimes needs to inspire, not voice doubt.

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.

In 1969, at the age of 19, I was lucky enough to work with George C. Scott in the definitive portrayal of his career over a period of many months and several countries on the definitive film version of Patton's WWII career.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

I did a film called 'Fort McCoy,' based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States.

'Feminist comedy,' practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.

The big fun in 'Battleship' is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is what the Japanese surrendered to.

I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.

At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

A military childhood in the 1950s was very much informed by WWII. My brothers and I often heard stories from our dad - and from other kids - about things that had happened to their dads. We constantly played war games and, nearly every Saturday, saw a different WWII movie at the post theater.

I was honored to have served in the Army for my country. I was at Anzio during WWII, and it makes you realize how very precious life is.

The thing about collaborators is that you don't know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren't among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.

Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.

Since the end of WWII, France's steady movement away from Western ideas of individual liberty and self-determination - and toward collectivist action and conformance - has created a people overly dependent on government, hobbled by crippling taxes and lacking in individual initiative.