Postwar Quotes

#1. My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

Sarah Waters

#2. In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

Charles Bracelen Flood

#3. Could it be that those who were reared in the postwar years really were spoiled, as we used to hear? Did a child-centered generation, raised in depression and war, produce a self-centered generation that resents children and parenthood?

C. Sommerville

#4. In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.

Noam Chomsky

#5. I'm worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.

David Bodanis

#6. If one seeks to analyze experiences and reactions to the first postwar years, I hope one may say without being accused of bias that it is easier for the victor than for the vanquished to advocate peace.

Gustav Stresemann

#7. Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Pankaj Mishra

#8. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.

Peter Gizzi

#9. How can we make the most of the opportunities afforded by the dynamism and the freedom set loose by America's postwar diffusion while mitigating its costs and burdens, especially for the most vulnerable among us? In

Yuval Levin

#10. The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.

Franjo Tudjman

#11. We are not a postwar generation, but a pre-peace generation. Jesus is coming.

Corrie Ten Boom

#12. With the postwar depression,
however, the farmers' problems became the bankers' problems, and the insurance companies', and the USDAs. Suddenly, everyone was interested in helping the farmer become modern.21

Deborah Fitzgerald

#13. If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.

Alan Greenspan

#14. Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.

Robert Gilpin

#15. Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

Michael Light

#16. I've always said that growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.

Rei Kawakubo

#17. The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about the power of women's sexuality run amok.

Rebecca Traister

#18. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

J.G. Ballard

#19. What people in the U.S. have to understand is that there is sometimes a deep political content in my work that's rooted in the postwar reconfiguration in Europe. I'm still a foreigner in America. I'm someone who's bringing nuanced stories from somewhere else that will always be harder to take.

Liam Gillick

#20. Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.

John Lewis Gaddis

#21. From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.

Kim Young-ha

#22. The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

J.G. Ballard

#23. In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.

Marcus Buckingham

#24. The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such.

Timothy Snyder

#25. Stravinskys music, hard, cold, unsentimental, enormously brilliant and virtuous, was now the favorite of my postadolescence. In a different way it achieved the hard, cold, postwar flawlessness which I myself wanted to attain-but in an entirely different style, medium ...

George Antheil

#26. What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind.

Norman Schwarzkopf

#27. When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company's top executive, had mocked it. "Chrysler builds cars to sit in," he said, "not to piss over.

David Halberstam

#28. Indeed, one modern President abjured God altogether, ending speeches with a chaste 'Thank you very much.' This was Jimmy Carter, the most genuinely devout President of the postwar period.

Jonathan Rauch

#29. I had a happy childhood, with many stimulations and support from my parents who, in postwar times, when it was difficult to buy things, made children's books and toys for us. We had much freedom and were encouraged by our parents to do interesting things.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

#30. The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America.

Henry A. Wallace

#31. Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.

Jerry Lewis

#32. The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

Nick Turse

#33. We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.

Joichi Ito

#34. Well, you know ... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.

Tim Curry

#35. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#36. South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto.

Mike Davis

#37. It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.

George Vecsey

#38. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.

Fareed Zakaria

#39. While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.

Anthony Marra

#40. I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

Graham Swift

#41. If I had been prime minister, I would have offered apologies to the Dutch Jewish community without hesitation. This would refer both to our government's attitude during the Second World War and to the very late postwar discovery that the restitution process had been poorly conceived.

Els Borst

#42. Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

Romola Garai

#43. For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.

Tony Judt

#44. 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.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#45. Three big assumptions proved wrong: one, that the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators; two, that oil would soon pay for Iraqi's rebuilding; and, three, that we have plenty of troops, weapons, and equipment for the postwar situation.

John Spratt

#46. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,

Masha Gessen

#47. The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

Noam Chomsky

#48. In the face of postwar austerity, hundreds of brides-to-be across the country sent Princess Elizabeth their clothing coupons so that she could have the dress of their dreams.

Hamish Bowles

#49. The Russians obtained a number of plants under Lend-Lease, which had been authorized by Washington, that I thought were not justified for their war effort. They wanted them for postwar use.

W. Averell Harriman

#50. We are firmly convinced that private capital, Chinese as well as foreign, must be given liberal opportunities for broad development in postwar China; for China needs industrial growth.

Mao Zedong

#51. I think the day you start building the war plan is the day you start beginning the postwar plan.

Jay Garner

#52. A 2006 Senate Report on the intelligence gathered about Iraq before the war also concluded, "Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.

Charles River Editors

#53. I believe in public ownership, but I have never favoured the remote nationalised model of the postwar era.

Jeremy Corbyn

#54. In the immediate postwar years, the whole of Europe was in a recession. So first of all, it helped us step out of a recession; it gave a certain amount of speed to the economy. But that was the first step.

Giovanni Agnelli

#55. The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.

Robert Smithson

#56. Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#57. The Boys of Summer were heroes in Brooklyn for a full postwar decade partly because the players could not entertain higher offers.

George Vecsey

#58. You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

W.G. Sebald

#59. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer's ordeal signified that the postwar "messianic role of the scientists" was now at an end.

Kai Bird