Second World War Quotes - Page 3

• We should recall that during the Second World War and the Great Depression there was an upsurge in popular, radical democracy. In all over the world. It took different forms, but it was there, everywhere. In Greece it was in the Greek revolution, and so on. And it had to be crushed. In countries like Greece, it was crushed by violence. In countries like Italy, where the US forces entered in 1943, it was crushed by attacking and destroying the anti-German partisans and restoring the traditional order.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, War, Order

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• The Iranian issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons ­nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Issues

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

  David Frum

  Crazy, War, Men

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• There was a deliberate decision after the failure of the League of Nations to make the next attempt to establish a global political actor sensitive to geopolitical realities. The underlying idea was to provide major states, defined in 1945 by reference to the winners in the Second World War (now an anachronism), with assurance that they could take part in the UN without jeopardising their national interests. In this regard, the UN has succeeded, as none of the big countries has withdrawn, and the Organisation has managed to achieve virtually universal membership of all sovereign states.

  Richard A. Falk

  Country, War, Reality

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The problem of ISIS is not recent. Ever since the Second World War, people in this region have been, and are today, living under brutal dictatorships governed by nationalistic fervor. As for the Kurdish question: nobody from the Arab world is serious about fighting ISIS. It's only the Kurdish people who are standing firm against ISIS. And I think Europe, the United States, and most other democratic countries of the world are beginning to look at the Kurds in another way. The Kurds are really becoming their partners in the region.

  Mano Khalil

  Country, War, Fighting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Between the postwar fifties - domesticity, people happy to be alive after the Second World War, wanting to build a home, make a family, make a nest. Women were pushed back into the home after having been active in the Second World War. It was a big Doris Day moment for women, which didn't suit all women.

  Sally Potter

  War, Home, People

  "TIFF: Interview with Sally Potter – Writer and Director of Ginger and Rosa". Interview with Melissa Silverstein, www.indiewire.com. September 13, 2012.

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• I watched American TV shows: Starsky & Hutch, Dallas, Rockford Files, Bonanza. And for many summers growing up, I worked on my aunt and uncle's farm in East Anglia. Down the street was an American cemetery for the Second World War, and every Memorial Day an American bomber would fly over that cemetery and drop rose petals.

  Scott Raab

  Summer, Memorial Day, Uncles

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• The oncoming trouble I speak of is climate change. It's going to affect all of you in the same way the Second World War consumed people of my parent's generation.

  Bill Nye

  War, People, Parent

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• While the Second World War brought about untold misery and suffering, it was also a time when the world witnessed extraordinary bravery. Through the collective, heroic efforts of countless men and women, victory was claimed over tyranny and evil.

  Sam Kutesa

  War, Men, Evil

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• The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Europe, Long

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

  Paul Johnson

  War, World, Versailles

  Paul Johnson (1972). “The offshore islanders; England's people from Roman occupation to the present”

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• For more than twenty-five years my mind had been deeply troubled by the fact that these mechanical and scientific achievements ofman had outrun his intellectual and spiritual power. ...Throughout the Second World War this terrible problem hung in the back of my mind. As I write these words the problem and the danger are as threatening as ever. We hope our nation will survive, but in its effort to survive will it transform itself intellectually and spiritually into the image of the thing against which we fought?

  Virginia Gildersleeve

  Education, Spiritual, War

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• We were such a part of everybody's life in the Second World War. We represented something overseas and at home - a sort of security.

  Patty Andrews

  War, Home, World

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• All leaders must be good communicators. But let's be clear, communications is not the same as oratory. Let me give you an example. General George C. Marshall was an exemplary public servant and military officer. He helped mobilize our nation for the Second World War and helped lay the foundation for peace as Secretary of State. He communicated through words, but more loudly through his actions.

  John Baldoni

  Military, War, Communication

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• There was a time, right up until the end of the Second World War and beyond, when white people in Europe thought that they basically owned the world and that everybody else was a sort of servant, or a curiosity, or whatever. And that informed 99 percent of the photographic practice that was done. Without being able to address that, I felt I would have failed in my attempt to explain what the urge to document is.

  Stuart Franklin

  War, People, Curiosity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

  Tony Judt

  Running, War, World

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• My family suffered very major losses during the Second World War, that's true. In my father's family, there were five brothers. I think four of them died. On my mother's side the picture was pretty much the same. Russia has suffered great losses. And of course we can't forget that.

  Vladimir Putin

  Mother, Brother, Father

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

  Robert Wyatt

  Art, War, Revolution

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. The US is the Western empire of the 19th century regrouping in the 20th, not out of wickedness, but because everybody else in Eurasia was so completely destroyed by the Second World War. Economically, that was quite a useful time for the US, so they ended up in the position of enormous power. And like any great power, they're going to act in their own interests. The problem is due to what the business community wants, which is to make as much money as they can out of what other people do and pay as little as possible for it.

  Robert Wyatt

  War, Thinking, People

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other's throats so they don't have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.

  George Friedman

  War, Challenges, Navy

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• For my mother, having a family was the most important thing in her life. In the Second World War, it was a challenge - surviving physically and mentally and finding somebody who you loved and who was willing to be with you.

  Etgar Keret

  Mother, War, Challenges

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

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• Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Thinking, People

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  New York, War, Home

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

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• The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism.

  Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

  Strong, War, Korea

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• I'm sort of optimistic about what we could do, but I'm very pessimistic about what we will do. I can't tell you that Al Gore's 10-year plan is impossible. I'm old enough to remember the Second World War - if we had a World War II-type mobilization, we might accomplish Gore's plan. In 1940 we were making tens of thousands of automobiles, and in 1941 we were making tens of thousands of airplanes. We mobilized as a nation. If we get that kind of mobilization as a nation or globally, then we could solve a lot of these problems.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  War, Airplane, Optimistic

  "Q&A: Paul Ehrlich". Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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