World War II quotes

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

My father Ted fought in North Africa, Italy, and Germany during World War II. My grandfather survived the horrors of the trenches in World War I. I truly believe that one of the E.U.’s greatest achievements is that it has kept its members out of conflict in Europe.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

Twenty-six million Russians died in the defense of their homeland against the Nazis.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

The only black battalion on Iwo Jima was a small munitions supply unit that came to the beach.

After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.

We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.

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?‘

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

I can testify to what UNICEF means to children because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II.

Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.