German War Sayings

#1. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

#2. My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.

Lisa Papademetriou

#3. I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.

Stephen Daldry

#4. I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.

David Mixner

#5. God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.

Adolf Hitler

#6. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

Kate Atkinson

#7. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

Stephen E. Ambrose

#8. Indeed," Fowler answered. He turned and looked at Tony critically. "I say, old man, but you're not much older than that German kid."
Yeah," Tony grinned. "But I'm from Texas and meaner than a junkyard bulldog. Makes a difference, you know.

Robert L. Wise

#9. Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.

Hank Bracker

#10. The German people are not a warlike nation. It is a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom

Adolf Hitler

#11. Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.

Adam Makos

#12. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#13. Our relationship with the United States is not reduced to questions of fighting terrorism and the Iraq war. German-American relations were so good for so many years because they extended deeply into the normal lives of people.

Angela Merkel

#14. War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?

Thomas Mann

#15. Why, they're the dirtiest guys in any town. They're the same ones that burned the houses of old German people during the war. They're the same ones that lynch Negroes. They like to be cruel. They like to hurt people, and they always give it a nice name, patriotism or protecting the constitution.

John Steinbeck

#16. When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.

Jimmy Wales

#17. I am particularly interested in the indications that the people seem to understand and approve the necessity of pursuing the course that will prevent a further effort on the part of the German peoples to continue the struggle for world domination, even though they are thoroughly beaten in this war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#18. Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.

Kurt Vonnegut

#19. When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest.

Walter Ulbricht

#20. Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe, together with the greater part of the [German] Reich. All over this territory, which would be of an enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.

Joseph Goebbels

#21. I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.

Fritz Sauckel

#22. Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.

Christian De Duve

#23. In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.

Albert Camus

#24. When a German soldier is running at you, there's no point quoting Virgil at him, you're better off kicking a football in his face.

Cesca Major

#25. The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.

Adolf Hitler

#26. The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

Kurt Vonnegut

#27. The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.

Leo Strauss

#28. After the outbreak of war, in April 1940, we left Geneva with our three children aged 4 years, 2 years and 2 weeks only to become part of the disordered refugee crowds fleeing across France from the German army.

James Meade

#29. When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, 'You're a MAN now!'
I damn near killed my first German.

Kurt Vonnegut

#30. Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;

Barbara W. Tuchman

#31. I'm still suffering from shock from the last war. I was almost drafted! Luckily I was wounded while taking the physical. When I reached the psychiatrist, I said, Give me a gun, I'll wipe out the whole German Army in five minutes. He said, You're crazy! I said, Write it down!

Jackie Mason

#32. President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now.

Roy Wilkins

#33. Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Barbara W. Tuchman

#34. And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.

Albert Camus

#35. In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars ...

Sylvia Plath

#36. Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same."

Albert Einstein

#37. This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.

Albert Camus

#38. Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.

Angela Merkel

#39. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.

Albert Camus

#40. Important as economic unification is for the recovery of Germany and of Europe, the German people must recognize that the basic cause of their suffering and distress is the war which the Nazi dictatorship brought upon the world.

James F. Byrnes

#41. My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.

Hermann Eilts

#42. We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.

Albert Camus

#43. Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?

Sinclair Lewis

#44. You must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest.

Winston Churchill

#45. Ferguson also takes a swipe at the conventional wisdom surrounding aspects of World War I. "The key to the Allies' victory was not an improvement in their ability to kill the enemy," Ferguson argues, "but rather a sudden increase in the willingness of German soldiers to surrender."5

Luke Williams

#46. Since the German people, with unparalleled heroism, but also at the cost of fearful sacrifices, has waged war against half the world, it is our right and our duty to obtain safety and independence for ourselves at sea.

Bernhard Von Bulow

#47. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#48. I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.

Caroline Leech

#49. I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

Nicholson Baker

#50. After the German occupation of Holland in May 1940, the last two dark years of the war I spent hiding indoors from the Nazis, eating tulip bulbs to fill the stomach and reading Kramers' book "Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung" by the light of a storm lamp.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

#51. World War II ended in a battle for a single buildng, Germany's Reichstag ... 7,000 German troops defending the building ... Nearly 5,000 men died in a battle for the building.

Andrei Cherny

#52. Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

Arthur Keith

#53. The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.

James Laughlin

#54. I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.

Edmund Ironside

#55. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm.

J.D. Salinger

#56. When the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

#57. I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.

Bill Nighy

#58. German people are essentially pacifists. Many still remember the experience of World War II. And they may not have seen Saddam Hussein as evil a person as a lot of other people have.

George W. Bush

#59. Germany's greatness makes it impossible for her to do without the ocean, but the ocean also proves that even in the distance, and on its farther side, without Germany and the German Emperor, no great decision dare henceforth be taken.

Wilhelm II

#60. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!

William L. Shirer

#61. Throughout the history of the Deutschritter the German genius is very evident, romantic idealism implemented with utter ruthlessness.

Desmond Seward

#62. The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.

Albert Camus

#63. The reason given by the President in asking Congress to declare war against Germany is that the German government has declared certain war zones, within which, by the use of submarines, she sinks, without notice, American ships and destroys American lives.

George William Norris

#64. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Ann Coulter

#65. Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.

Anthony Doerr

#66. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.

Anne Frank

#67. At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.

Antony Beevor

#68. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.

Albert Camus

#69. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

Erich Fromm

#70. The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! ... It was, of course, just like German spools to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibenlungen-like. Dwarfs probably!

Ford Madox Ford

#71. Church, delivered this message to his troops at the outbreak of war: "Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, on me as German Emperor, the Spirit of God has descended. I am His weapon. His sword and His visor. . . . Death to cowards and unbelievers!

Joseph Loconte

#72. Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

Theodore Roosevelt

#73. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides.

Richard J. Evans

#74. It was the German schoolhouse which destroyed Napoleon III. France, since then, is making monster cannon and drilling soldiers still, but she is also building schoolhouses. As long as war is possible, anything that makes better soldiers people want.

Henry Ward Beecher

#75. If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

George Orwell

#76. For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.

Albert Camus

#77. The First World War began because one man was shot. The Second World War began because of a mad German dictator. Who knows how a third could start. There are also people who think that the war has been going for a long time.

Ronald Lauder

#78. In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces- if this strength, this enormous agglomeration that surrounded them on every side, could not break the Russians, then nothing would.

Alan Clark

#79. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

Nikola Tesla

#80. The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee.

Regis Philbin

#81. I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.

Diane Kruger

#82. A German attack on Russia's ally France would, in reality, be defensive - but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.

Ken Follett

#83. The days are numbered for those bums over in England."
German Tank commander

Leo McKinstry

#84. Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy - and once settled it cannot be altered.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#85. At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.

Evelyn Waugh

#86. If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin.

Joseph Goebbels

#87. The assertion that it is the intention of the German Reich to coerce the Austrian State is absurd!

Adolf Hitler

#88. Like so many of our people, we have now had a personal experience of German barbarity which only strengthens the resolution of all of us to fight through to final victory.

George VI

#89. The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany.

Julius Streicher

#90. What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

Douglas A. Blackmon

#91. Right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail

Charles Kaiser

#92. The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars.

John Mearsheimer

#93. The arm was the arm, and it was the arm - not her husband, or even herself - that she thought about seven years later, on June 28, 1941, as the first German war blasts shook her wooden house to its foundations, and her eyes rolled back in her head to view, before dying, her insides.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#94. German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

Donna Summer

#95. But when he and Zuse proposed it to the German Army in 1942, the commanders said they were confident that they would win the war before the two years it would take to build such a machine.

Walter Isaacson

#96. Some of our German passengers on the ship would be crying. The Brits were the same way. They were crying, because they realized a new war was about to break out across Europe, with Hitler at the head of the goose-stepping parade.

Frank Buckles

#97. Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides.

Robert O. Paxton

#98. There is no doubt that the adsence of a second front in Europe considerably relieves the position of the German army.

Joseph Stalin

#99. After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

Charles Duhigg

#100. In the Second World War, they're talking about the Japanese traitors and putting them into concentration camps. But companies like DuPont had factories in Germany turning out stuff for the German Army.

Rob Walton