Top 100 Second World Quotes
#1. 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
#2. As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.
Judith Butler
#3. After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#4. My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.
Santosh Kalwar
#5. We are the people who won the Second World War and saved the world. We went to the moon. We gave the world the cell phone and Bruce Springsteen. There's no telling what we can accomplish.
Brian Williams
#6. During the Second World War, nobody built any concert halls or theaters. After the war, Lincoln Center was a very brave project because all those architects had never built a theater before. We've learned a lot since then about the nature of materials and the isolation that's required.
Hugh Hardy
#7. When I got home from the Second World War, mu Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Kurt Vonnegut
#8. 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
#9. At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.
Nina Bawden
#10. 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
#11. That's exactly where they send entry-level diplomats. After you cut your teeth on a few civil wars and a famine or two, you might get lucky and be given a plum post somewhere in the SECOND World.
Elle Lothlorien
#12. I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread.
Robert Winston
#13. The Second World War wasn't bad provided you were with nice people.
Evelyn Waugh
#14. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.
Donald Barthelme
#15. Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.
Greg Johnson
#16. What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?
Bernard Levin
#17. I can completely take a second World War gun apart and put it back together again thanks to 'Band Of Brothers.' That's always useful. I've got lots and lots of random skills I'll probably never need again.
Andrew-Lee Potts
#18. We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.
Hans Fritzsche
#19. Since the end of the Second World War, our population has more than doubled to 27 million people.
Kim Campbell
#20. Before the Second World War, L'Oreal in France was an active supporter of the French fascists. The cosmetic group's founder Eugene Schueller was an active member of the 'Cagoule' group, committed to the violent overthrow of the Third Republic, and hosted meetings at Oreal headquarters.
Geoff Mulgan
#21. It is so important for European countries, post-Second World War, to prove that they can be successful multiethnic and multiracial democracies. I think we in Britain have had great success in avoiding the hatreds and prejudices of the past.
David Cameron
#22. I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.
Harold Pinter
#23. 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
#24. American power remains today what it was in the Second World War and the Cold War: the greatest force for freedom in the world.
Elliott Abrams
#25. I collect old first and second World War artifacts and things. I'm a little secret history nerd. I've been lucky enough to do quite a few war movies too so I've taken little things off each film.
Jeremy Irvine
#26. The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.
Jonathan Glover
#27. During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.
Stephen Ambrose
#28. Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.
Lucas Mascotto-Carbone
#29. It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
Martin Seligman
#30. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.
Charles Krauthammer
#32. In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.
Adam Michnik
#33. These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.
Boris Johnson
#34. My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.
Georgie Fame
#35. I think one of the great disasters (in military history) is the way that the Second World War has become the defining reference point for every crisis and every conflict.
Antony Beevor
#36. Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.
Thom Yorke
#37. Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.
Godfrey Hounsfield
#38. The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
Fredric Jameson
#39. A film centered around the Second World War with a predominantly white cast would not have the pressure on it that 'Red Tails' has.
David Oyelowo
#40. The '54 World Cup was the first time the people got the recognition back after the second World War and felt like they are proud of something you know it brought people back together and you know now we can keep our heads up again.
Jurgen Klinsmann
#41. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.
Teju Cole
#42. As British and French imperialism ebbed following the end of the Second World War, America became the main outside player in Arab affairs.
Stephen Kinzer
#43. For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.
Ernst Zundel
#44. After the Second World War, people in Japan no longer died for their country, and even that expression was no longer used.
Naoto Kan
#45. The U.S. dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the Allies used on Germany and Japan together in the Second World War.
Nick Davies
#46. The Philippines was with the U.S. in the Second World War, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and now in the war against terrorism.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
#47. 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
#48. If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.
Susanna Kearsley
#49. The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.
Ruth Duccini
#50. After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
Kenzaburo Oe
#51. I'd always wanted to do something about the Second World War, but I didn't want to do another combat film, whether it was air, land, or sea.
Michael Apted
#52. If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.
Timothy Garton Ash
#53. When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.
Christopher Lee
#54. Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.
Andrew Roberts
#55. 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
#56. Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion.
John Lennon
#57. 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
#58. The sums acquired by the administrators of this domaine extraordinaire in the period of France's zenith were quite remarkable and in some ways foreshadow Nazi Germany's plunder of its satellites and conquered foes during the Second World War.
Paul Kennedy
#59. During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
Lionel Blue
#60. My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.
Angela Carter
#61. Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.
Antony Beevor
#62. When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
#63. Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider
Sandra Scarr
#64. 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
#65. If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
#66. Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.
Ridley Scott
#67. On the night that the Second World war was declared, there were crowds in the street. It was a summer's night and there was a blackout. On every side you heard people crying: 'Look at the moon!' The moon had been there every minute of their lives and they'd never seen it.
Laurens Van Der Post
#68. When I was between the ages of five and nine, the soldiers of the Second World War wanted to have Betty Grable, but I wanted to be Betty Grable. She was the epitome of an alluring woman; she had it all as far as I was concerned.
Grace Slick
#69. And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing.
Patrick Macnee
#70. We tend to think about fascism in terms of the Second World War.
Ian Hart
#71. Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
James Buchan
#72. Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
Antonio Tabucchi
#73. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.
Noam Chomsky
#74. I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.
Abbey Lincoln
#76. In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist.
Juan Goytisolo
#77. I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.
Ernst Zundel
#78. If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.
Christian Lacroix
#79. I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.
Antonio Tabucchi
#80. If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we'd be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.
Ralph Nader
#81. If you will remember history correctly, even the Second World War was perpetrated by a stateless actor, by murdering the Prince Rudolf, if you remember. And so is the case with 9/11. It was a stateless actor which has made the world go to war.
Asif Ali Zardari
#82. The generation which lived through the Second World War is disappearing. Post-war generations see Europe's great achievements - liberty, peace and prosperity - as a given.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#83. The introduction of radar, a completely new way to see, in the Second World War altered the basis of warfare more profoundly than any of the inventions that had marked the industrialization of combat.
Louis Brown
#84. We need a Nuremberg to put on trial the economic order that they have imposed on us, that every three years kills more men, women and children by hunger and preventable or curable diseases than the death toll in six years of the second world war.
Fidel Castro
#85. When the Second World War broke out, I felt that everyone must do his share, and I began composing songs and marches for the front. But soon events assumed such gigantic and far-reaching scope as to demand larger canvasses.
Sergei Prokofiev
#86. After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.'
Dave Brubeck
#87. What is happened in the years since the Second World War is not a temporary truce. It is not simply a ceasefire. Instead of battling with weapons and armaments, people battle only with arguments and ideas.
Gordon Brown
#88. Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.
Harald Zur Hausen
#89. I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
Doris Lessing
#90. We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.
Vincent Bugliosi
#91. The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.
Andrew Roberts
#92. The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.
Tom Hodgkinson
#93. What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.
Susan Sontag
#94. My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
Robert Osborne
#95. Let us not forget that the European Community started as a project for peace after the terrible Second World War. And today people take for granted the freedom to travel, to study, to work abroad. And the citizens of one country have almost exactly the same rights as another country.
Jose Manuel Barroso
#96. The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#97. The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
Antony Beevor
#98. I think that perhaps the classic propagandists of the - in the Second World War was Winston Churchill. He was extremely skilled and adept at it.
Alexander Haig
#99. More than 55,000 men from Bomber Command lost their lives, of whom 38,000 were British. That's one in 10 of all the British servicemen lost in the Second World War. It beggars belief that there has not been some recognition for what they gave until now.
Carol Vorderman
#100. Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.
Tariq Ramadan
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