Quotes About World Wars

#1. That whole generation that's gone now, that lived through the two world wars, is a great example to all of us. They knew how to live. If something bad happened, they didn't sit at home, eat Haagen-Dazs, and watch a movie.

Sigourney Weaver

#2. I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

Tim Winton

#3. If the world is disarmed, and remains disarmed, there will be no more world wars.

George William Norris

#4. the memorial stained-glass window dedicated to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, on whose side God had been in two world wars, though this hadn't prevented them suffering heavy casualties.

David Nobbs

#5. As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.

Christina Romer

#6. Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

Doris Lessing

#7. I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

Muriel Rukeyser

#8. For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.

Pete Townshend

#9. We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

Erica Jong

#10. The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization.

F.L. Lucas

#11. It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Edward S. Greenberg

#12. But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.

Nick Rahall

#13. As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

Diane Ackerman

#14. We must never again let America be led into a fratricidal war like the last two world wars, for the sake of alien, minority interests.

George Lincoln Rockwell

#15. We live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about

Edward N. Luttwak

#16. From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East, from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent, and even here in our own hemisphere, our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.

John Hoeven

#17. What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)

Tony Judt

#18. all over the world wars
people plagued
by the same ills as their oppressor
the real revolution is
to love myself.

Pamela Sneed

#19. We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.

Michael Scheuer

#20. Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.

Richard C. Armitage

#21. It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

Otto Penzler

#22. Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

Mark Skousen

#23. The United States has used force abroad more than 130 times, but has only declared war five times - the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II.

John Yoo

#24. Science and technology have been embarrassed by two world wars, many smaller ones, and the spread of weapons that could destroy humanity. As a result, there is some loss of confidence in the great achievements of technology.

Thomas Keating

#25. This is a story of a period between two World Wars - an interim in which insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat.

Charlie Chaplin

#26. We've been there on World Wars, it's time for World Party I.

Vanna Bonta

#27. In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.

Henry A. Kissinger

#28. Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen ... We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

Nicholas Stern

#29. You can tell the state of civilization by the way people dress. If the people who fought two World Wars came back to 2010 and saw all of us running around in tracksuits, what would they think? It is just about being sloppy.

Daphne Guinness

#30. In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

Richard Dawkins

#31. World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.

Alice Walker

#32. In my opinion there is no other salvation for civilization and even for the human race than the creation of a world government with security on the basis of law. As long as there are sovereign states with their separate armaments and armament secrets, new world wars cannot be avoided.

Albert Einstein

#33. Europe is so much the home of Horror, with its myths of vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and the undead, yet it's like those myths were exported to Hollywood, leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition as a way of processing its traumas, particularly the two world wars.

Mark Gatiss

#34. Two world wars in twenty-one years, and the universal dread of nuclear incineration. This time God has given us John Paul II,

Fulton J. Sheen

#35. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

Warren Buffett

#36. What we do with this peace-whether we preserve it and defend it, or whether we lose it and let it slip away-will be the measure of our worthiness of the spirit and sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands who gave their lives in two World Wars, Korea, and in Vietnam.

Richard M. Nixon

#37. Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

Ashwin Sanghi

#38. There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#39. We are a resilient country. We've been through a Civil War; we've been through two World Wars. We've been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!

Rick Perry

#40. I grew up between the two world wars and received a rather solid general education, the kind middle class children enjoyed in a country whose educational system had its roots dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

George Andrew Olah

#41. Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world's annual gross domestic product.

Nicholas Stern

#42. 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

#43. Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#44. People should be changed by world wars," I said, "else what are world wars for?

Kurt Vonnegut

#45. I am for a close global association in trade and financial matters, rather than the opposite possibility of excessive nationalism, as manifested in the two world wars.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#46. There has never been a century that has not had a systemic war - a systemic war, meaning when the entire system convulses. From the Seven Years' War in Europe to the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century to the World Wars, every century has one.

George Friedman

#47. I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure. It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.

Bertrand Russell

#48. After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.

Hans Kung

#49. We may want to believe that previous world wars and economic depressions have awakened people from their deep sleep, but they didn't and that's why history keeps repeating itself.

Daniel Marques

#50. How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

Edwin Way Teale

#51. If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#52. Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters-perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair-may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple a that.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#53. The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.

Rick Atkinson

#54. The two world wars boosted American power and devastated potential rivals to an extent that could not have lasted more than a few decades.

Ian Bremmer

#55. We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most.

Frederick Lenz

#56. If women ran the world we wouldn't have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.

Robin Williams

#57. Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.

Adolf Hitler

#58. Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.

Sarah Monette

#59. My shirt and my hat always say 'World Champion' in some language. English, Spanish, Chinese, 'Star Wars' language, which is also known as Aurebesh, mermaid language.

Judah Friedlander

#60. I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

Jeremy Northam

#61. Craster is his own man. He has sworn us no vows. Nor is he subject to our laws. Your heart is noble, Jon, but learn a lesson here. We cannot set the world to rights. That is not our purpose. The Night's Watch has other wars to fight.

George R R Martin

#62. The vast majority of beings who incarnate on this planet are at the stage of their evolution where power is the dominant theme. They are learning about power. That is why we live in a world where there are so many wars and so much destruction.

Frederick Lenz

#63. This is life in a fallen world, where wars come and go, where nations rage and people cry in torment. We must be strong, not in ourselves, but in Him. And trust that His love and His wisdom and His light will see us through.

Janette Oke

#64. It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

Julian Assange

#65. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

Ernst Junger

#66. And, what is more, we know how an all-consuming passion for freedom in the world never fails to lead to conflicts and wars which are no less consuming.

Jean Paulhan

#67. Let us then remember the dead-and all wars-gratefully. And let us hope that because of them we may become a touch better, a thimbleful wiser, and a handshake more tolerant of this changing world they did not live to see.

Arthur Hailey

#68. More people have been killed by totalitarian regimes, during times of peace, than in all the wars in the world combined.

John Ringo

#69. We think of - there are too many wars, of course, in the world as we speak, but my read on this suggests to me that water is going to be the resource into the future that we're really - that countries, nations, are going to be fighting for control over.

Tavis Smiley

#70. If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.

Sylvia Plath

#71. The diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#72. In your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world's face.

Robin Hobb

#73. that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed.

Terry Brooks

#74. On movies like Star Trek and Star Wars, you have so much that will be created or extended digitally, and it's a slippery slope where you can get lost in a world of synthetic.

J.J. Abrams

#75. All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden.

Reginald Farrer

#76. Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on ...

Matthew Pearl

#77. Words start wars and end them, create love and choke it, bring us to laughter and joy and tears. Words cause men and women to willingly risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Our world, as we know it, revolves on the power of words.

Roy Williams

#78. If the Empire would destroy a world as important and prosperous as Alderaan ... no place in the galaxy was safe.

Claudia Gray

#79. Wars are not all evil, they are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed.

William Tecumseh Sherman

#80. The great mountains of wars and conflicts in the world can only be removed by picking up tiny stones of hatred and anger bit by bit. We must all be involved!

Israelmore Ayivor

#81. Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

Nick Turse

#82. I have been the patient one. I have waited for the world to stop being silly. I have waited for it to stop wars. I have waited for politicians to be honest. I have waited for real estate men to be good citizens. But while I wait, I dance!

Ray Bradbury

#83. Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

Pat Barker

#84. A rare objectivity and insight can be imparted regarding this world's struggle for spiritual integrity. In the land of Faerie, the reader may see his small battles writ large in the wars of titans or elves and understand for the first time, his own worth.

Michael D. O'Brien

#85. It seems like someone is using wars and our economic crisis to spread distrust and rancor among the population. In times like these, those are dangerous feelings to spread around.

Riccardo Bruni

#86. I don't belong to a religion. Religion's the reason the world's falling apart ... " That's what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It's a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion's not about being holy," Shay said. "Just holier-than-thou.

Jodi Picoult

#87. How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

Aberjhani

#88. The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#89. He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars,

Richard Flanagan

#90. The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a "religious society" that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#91. Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions

Adolf Hitler

#92. Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

Ishmael Beah

#93. AIDS today in Africa is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria ... We must act now for the sake of the world.

Nelson Mandela

#94. School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

Antony Beevor

#95. If women ran the world there would be no wars. However every 28 days there would be some very intense negotiations.

Robin Williams

#96. So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble - though it would definitely be green.

Randall Munroe

#97. I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

Larry Hagman

#98. Foresight is the cause of Europe's present wars. If one would take pains to forsee nothing, the whole world would be tranquil, and I do not believe that one would be worse off for not waging war.

Abbe Galiani

#99. Each year, every city in the world that can should have a multiday festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction.

Henry Rollins

#100. One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.

Pete Hamill