Top 100 The Second World War 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. The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#3. After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of re-entry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco ...
Jeffrey Eugenides
#4. In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.
Yoko Ono
#5. 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
#6. (I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.) The
Noam Chomsky
#7. Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.
John Berger
#8. I think I'm just someone that just tries to get by. I'm kind of - if it was during the Second World War, I'd be a black marketeer, I think.
Craig Ferguson
#9. It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#10. We can say that Japan is the only country that calls into question the outcome of the Second World War; no one else does.
Sergei Lavrov
#11. The number one priority now is reducing the deficit that they [Labour] left us - the biggest deficit since the Second World War.
Iain Duncan Smith
#12. Likewise, Humanities Computing is the creative result of failure on the part of the manufacturers of early computers to produce operational machines in time to be used during the Second World War (or, one can argue, of failure on the part of the allied forces to make the war last longer).
Melissa Terras
#13. It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
Antony Beevor
#14. My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills ... So my parents always struggled.
Patti Smith
#15. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#16. Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.
Victor Davis Hanson
#17. I feel connected to the Second World War because my father lost his father in that war. So, through my dad and the effect it had on him of losing his father young, I always felt connected to the war. It goes back years, but it still feels to me as if we're completely living in it.
Tom Hooper
#18. The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.
Robert Fisk
#19. What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#20. Education is the great growth industry of the Third World. Since the Second World War, we have multiplied the number of children in school by four, with even larger multiples for secondary and university education.
Arthur Lewis
#21. Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.
Seth Shostak
#22. 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
#23. Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend.
George Carlin
#24. My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#25. People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again ... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood.
Sylvester Stallone
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
A.S. Byatt
#32. The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.
Alan Greenspan
#33. 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
#34. Most people learn all about the Second World War in school, or else, they see so many films put out by Hollywood, that it's easy to think we know exactly what happened.
Jeff Shaara
#35. 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
#36. This unprecedented crisis, which is without doubt the worst since the second world war, is not over.
Giorgio Napolitano
#37. The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians.
Traian Basescu
#38. In critical ways, Obama has reversed not just Bush policy but every president's approach to the world since the Second World War, save for that of his soulmate Jimmy Carter.
Elliott Abrams
#39. Since the Second World War, rates of common mental illness (depression and anxiety) have been increasing in the industrialized nations, whereas rates of recovery from severe mental illness have not improved despite the availability of apparently effective therapies such as antipsychotic drugs.
Richard Bentall
#40. How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
Ali Smith
#41. To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.
Ewa Kopacz
#42. There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.
Noam Chomsky
#43. Ukippers are the kinds of fools who haven't noticed they're sleep-walking towards fascism. Many UKIP candidates are of the age when their parents fought in the Second World War.
Robert Webb
#44. 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
#45. These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.
Alistair Cooke
#46. I knew trucking was growing. It grew from the Second World War to the time that I bought the bridge. There were interstate highways being built. I thought there was opportunity.
Manuel Moroun
#47. I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.
Ernst Zundel
#48. The achievements of Labour in the years after the Second World War should never be underestimated, but they are now history.
Bob Crow
#49. The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.
Douglas Hurd
#50. Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
Tariq Ali
#51. My dad was in the Second World War with General Patton. He won medals for bravery, but he came home quite damaged, so he was a handful. He told us some terrible stories, and I guess you'd say he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jerry Hall
#52. In Finland, we learned quite a lot from our own civil war. The wounds were visible when I was a boy, but my generation went into the Second World War and it united the Finnish nation, so I do not see any more wounds.
Harri Holkeri
#53. THE STORM OF WAR A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Andrew Roberts
#54. I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects
Boris Johnson
#55. Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.
Evan Osnos
#56. 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
#57. Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.
Ken Livingstone
#58. Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.
William Golding
#59. Think about a guy like Bob Mitchum, with his kind of chest gut not defining itself one way or the other. Was there anybody tougher? Lee Marvin was a marine sniper during the Second World War. They had this sense of themselves, and they had this product of being a man in a masculine way.
Joe Carnahan
#60. The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.
Jeffrey Sachs
#61. Now that we've made that decision, everyone is thinking about the practical consequences and I think Theresa May could be the most challenging prime ministership since the Suez Crisis, possibly since the Second World War.
Jeremy Hunt
#62. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.
Colin Ward
#63. When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
Antony Beevor
#64. Under the ominous shadow which the second World War and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to life itself.
Cordell Hull
#65. In the early hours of 16 December 1944, the Germans launched their last great offensive of the Second World War against weakly held U.S. positions in the Ardennes Forest, the site of their original Blitzkrieg success against the French in 1940.
Saul David
#66. What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.
Iain Duncan Smith
#67. Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don't have large minority groups.
Aleksander Kwasniewski
#68. 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
#69. The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people's minds.
Martin Rees
#70. Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.
Patrick Macnee
#71. The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.
John Keegan
#72. The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#73. It was through the Second World War that most of us suddenlyappreciated for the first time the power of man's concentrated efforts to understand and control the forces of nature.We were appalled by what we saw.
Vannevar Bush
#74. The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
#75. Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I've met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.
Christopher Heyerdahl
#76. Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.
Karl Marlantes
#77. The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions - but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock.
Edmond Taylor
#78. Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.
Masha Gessen
#79. I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War.
Jimmy Carter
#80. Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.
Ray Bradbury
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.
Antonio Tabucchi
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
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