Best 160 quotes in «world war ii quotes» category

[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.] Yes [...] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being 'evil' (because of World War II), but back in World War I it was much more ambiguous who was at fault - and the allies, including our French and British allies and the Russians also were at fault - and after World War I there was a revulsion because the Bolsheviks released their correspondences with Britain and France: Britain and France were trying to grab colonies, and so the American people said, 'We were fighting...we lost all these people in this massive war just to help these people grab territory?' So there was a revulsion at that time; we don't hear that now because we're distant from it. Woodrow Wilson has been elevated as one of the better presidents but I think if you go back and look at it, the war was avoidable...and of course Woodrow Wilson helped bring Hitler to power by insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I - which was totally unnecessary. Germany was a constitutional monarchy before the war, and was vilified. It was actually the most aggressive state in Europe [...] and there were many things wrong with the Kaiser's personality, but I think Germany is unnecessarily vilified for that war.

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

I don't know whether Western listeners would find my words embarrassing—it is difficult for me to judge that kind of reaction—but I would put it this way: those people who have lived in the most terrible conditions, on the frontier between life and death, be it people from the West or from the East, all understand that between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction, that it is not one and the same thing—good or evil—that one cannot build one's life without regard to this distinction. I am surprised that pragmatic philosophy consistently scorns moral considerations; and nowadays in the Western press we read a candid declaration of the principle that moral considerations have nothing to do with politics. I would remind you that in 1939 England thought differently. If moral considerations were not applicable to politics, then it would be incomprehensible why England went to war with Hitler's Germany. Pragmatically, you could have gotten out of the situation, but England chose the moral course, and experienced and demonstrated to the world perhaps the most brilliant and heroic period in its history.

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed by train towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen….

If you can only say so much you know I always look for letters and don't think they are ever dull - I have saved every one - I think they should be kept to hand down to the grandchildren," 26 March 1943

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen….

Imagine if you can how I felt when I arrived in Strasbourg. I could still vividly remember the cruel treatment I had received in this same railroad station just a couple of months earlier. I tried not to do anything that would attract attention to myself and strove to be inconspicuous. There were still crowds of people trying to get home, but things seemed different. From the Rosheim train station, it was a long, tiring walk back to Bischoffsheim, and as I walked I noticed that people were scurrying by and I just sensed that something terrible had happened. As I rounded the corner and started down the main street, I could see a crowd clustered around the gate to the Ortsgruppenleiter’s farmyard. It all looked very familiar since I had lived in the apartment across the street but nothing prepared me for what I was about to see. Heavens, what a terrible sight! I almost screamed but somehow managed to keep quiet and stifled any sounds that I normally would have made. There on the barn door was Herr Erdmann, crucified! He was still alive and twitching as he hung from some large rusty nails that had been driven into his flesh.

I just can’t comprehend, that you, Borge, of all people, couldn’t keep your mouth shut.

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

In 1939, Hitler expanded the German Navy and, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Germany then established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This protectorate included those portions of Czechoslovakia that had not already been incorporated into Germany. On August 30, 1939, the German Reich issued an ultimatum to Poland concerning the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. On September 1st, without waiting for a response to its ultimatum, Germany invaded Poland. Much to Hitler’s surprise, England honored its treaty with Poland. Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thereby ushering in another World War. Officially, “The Second World War” in Europe was started by the German Reich when it attacked Poland, although at the time Germany blamed the Treaty of Versailles.

In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.

In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him...He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action.

I never thought I should live to grow blasé about the sound of gunfire, but so I have

In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible. Imagine that someone comes into your home—someone you don’t like—he settles down, gives orders: “Here we are, we’re at home now; you must obey.” To me that was unbearable.

In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.

Instinctively I reached out and could feel that the object was a shoe; no it was a heavy boot. And then looking up, I realized that there was a man hanging from the tree. As my eyes adjusted to this gruesome sight, I could tell that it was one of the Russian soldiers that I had just recently met over breakfast and now here he was hanging from a noose.

In wartime, everyone's birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad.

In war, the damage you inflict on the enemy might be immediately apparent. The damage you inflict on yourself in doing so will only become apparent later.

Is it morally acceptable to murder one hundred innocent people in the process of catching a serial killer who has murdered ten people? If you think World War II was justified, your answer should be yes.

It grey louder. Louder. They were singing, singing at the top of their lungs. Andrius joined, and then my brother and the gray-haired man. And finally, the bald man joined in, singing out national anthem. 'Lithuania, land of heroes...

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world," wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.

I think that is not true," Uncle Henrik said. "I think you are like your mama,and like your papa, and like me. Frightened, but determined, and if the time came to be brave, I quite sure you would be very, very brave." "But," he added, "it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. And so your mama does not know everything.Neither do I. We only know what we need to know." "Do you understand what I am saying?" he asked, looking into her eyes. Annemarie frowned. She wasn't sure.What did bravery mean? She had been very frightened the day--not long ago though now it seemed far in the past-- when the soldier had stopped her on the street and asked questions in his rough voice. And she had not known that the German were going to take away the Jews. And so, when the soldiers asked, looking at Ellen that day, "What is the name of your friend?"she had been able to handle him, even though she was frightened. If she had known everything, it would have not been so easy to be brave.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

It is when we finally realize the futility of violence and the invalidity of war will we, the people of this world finally wake up!

It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest parts of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into the stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.

It was a glorious experience for the children to travel by rail and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the rear of the last car of the Blue Train, were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be, as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York City to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town or Kaapstad in Afrikaans, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.

I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story.

Loomis was largely responsible for the committee's wholehearted sponsoring of microwave radar research. The army was skeptical, believing that microwave radar was 'for the next war, not this one." The army had already worked to improve its transmitting tubes so that the wavelength could be reduced to 1 1/2 meters and thought anything much shorter than that could not be perfected anytime soon. Given how slow they had been to capitalize on new technology in the past, Loomis regarded the army's attitude as more a reflection on their own bureaucracy than those posed by the research challenge.

Looking back, all he could see was a swirling pillar of ash and bones behind him. But ahead, there was someone standing on the surface of the water! Suddenly, a strong hand plunged through the watery roiling veil and held his arm fast. It jerked, and Dietrich shuddered. The hand lifted him straight up--into the warmth, into the light. "This is the end--for me the beginning of life.

I went along on this ride, as did Adolph, and we returned to the Feudenheim district of Mannheim, which was where our apartment stood. The roads were extremely cratered from the frequent bombings and the driver had to carefully circumvent these deep chasms. As we drove along we were fully aware that we could also become an inviting target, but eventually we arrived at the house safely. Surprisingly, the house was still relatively undamaged and my flat was locked up and further secured with a padlock, which I had used. It was apparent from the drawn blinds that everyone had moved out. Luckily I still had the keys and could open the door. Letting ourselves in, we looked around. It was really surprising that everything was still in place and that looters hadn’t ransacked everything, as was usually the case. Pointing out the items of furniture I would need, Herr Meyer quickly organized the boys, in a military fashion, and had them carry my things down the three flights of stairs. Even the truck driver helped carry my things, and to my delight the move went smoothly. When the truck was finally loaded, the weight became apparent. Weighted down with an old coal stove and its chimney sections, kitchen cupboard, a radio, double bed and mattress, a sofa and my wardrobe as well as pots and pans, it was down onto its axles.

Minnie Spotted Wolf from Butte, Montana, was the first Native American to enlist in the Marine Corps Womens' Reserve. Spotted Wolf joined in 1943. She commented that Marine Corps boot camp was "hard, but not that hard.

Muchos de los oficiales que habían tomado parte en la Gran Guerra habían ido ascendiendo automáticamente sin que hubiesen vuelto a preocuparse de las evoluciones que el arte militar hubiese podido experimentar en los últimos veinte años.

My father chose acquiescence and life rather than resistance and death. Not a very admirable choice, but a very human one.

Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.

My parents often talked about how beautiful a city Hamburg was. We had coffee table books with beautiful glossy black and white photographs showing the city prior to the heavy Allied bombings and subsequent firestorm. It showed the famous harbor, the lakes and canals. Hamburg is sometimes referred to as the Venice of the north. As our train pulled into the huge covered station I really did not know what to expect. None of us were aware of the tremendous amount of damage the city had sustained, however we had been informed that two of my father’s sisters and their families had died in “Operation Gomorrah” the hellish fire that had all but eradicated the city. Although I was quite young at the time I vividly remember my parent’s tremendous grief when they learned from the scarce, intermittent correspondence they received via the Red Cross, that many members of our family had died and much of what they remembered of Hamburg was gone.

One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, honestly believed that he could reason with Adolf Hitler in good faith. Now, most history books find little else to say about Chamberlain and he is solely remembered for believing that he could pacify Herr Führer by signing the Munich Agreement of 1938. In doing this, he ceded to Germany the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, without having any real authority to do so. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier followed suit, thereby giving the “German Reich” a piece of Czechoslovakia, consisting of the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. In March of 1939, German troops rolled in and occupied the territory. Three other parts broke off from Czechoslovakia, with one becoming the Slovak Republic, another part being annexed by Hungary, and the third part, which was borderland, becoming a part of Poland. These all came together to become satellite states and allies of Nazi Germany. On May 10, 1940, in a radio address to the 8th Pan American Scientific Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “I am a pacifist. You, my fellow citizens of twenty-one American Republics, are pacifists too.” Roosevelt was referring to Canada and Latin America. The United States attempted to remain neutral and did not enter into the war until four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Roosevelt opposed the concept of war and made every attempt to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities in Europe. On December 11, 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

No thoughts had I of anything, Or at least that's what I thought; I even thought I couldn't think, But now I think I never thought.

Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.

One of my tasks was to set the table for the family. They ate in the dining room and we ate in the kitchen. They ate off of plates but we ate directly off the table. Yes, we ladled the food directly onto the table, even the gravy! I never heard of doing this… perhaps it was a German tradition that I had never heard of. I tried to treat this as a joke and once asked Clarissa if we should pour the coffee and milk onto the table as well. My joke didn’t go over very well and Brigitte brought things back into true perspective when she reminded me that at least we had milk and coffee and that I shouldn’t upset the family. As long as we weren’t abused this would have to do for now…. !

On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down.... Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each would that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. I took them all away, and if there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away. Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye. They ere French, they were Jews, and they were you.

Our efforts to brace and strengthen the ceiling in the dark and dismal cellar of our home, with poles that were spaced about three feet apart, soon proved to be totally inadequate. We also fashioned window and door guards using scrap iron and steel as protection against the nightly rain of relentless horror by the bombings from above. Every time an air raid alarm sounded the five children and three women, living in this old building, stumbled down into the dark, damp basement. It was extremely difficult for one person to fit a baby carriage down the steep stairs and since my baby daughter’s pram was just too large for me to handle alone, I had to lift Ursula out of it and carry her down steep stairs to our makeshift subterranean pantry. The extreme cold of winter made the intolerable situation even worse. To care for little Ursula, my baby girl, I was forced to sit on the floor of this subterranean pantry. I can still remember the thick coarse material of the heavy coat I wore, as I crouched in what I thought was a protected corner, on the dirt floor. With the upturned collar of my heavy coat scratching my cheeks and uncertain of my surroundings, I fumbled and struggled in the dark and severe cold trying to burp, change and nurse my small, hungry child.