Top 100 World War Quotes
#1. This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. 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
#3. When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio because the pictures were better.
Alistair Cooke
#4. George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.
Christopher Buckley
#5. In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jan Karon
#6. America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.
Sam Kean
#7. Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson
#8. Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.
Ridley Scott
#9. This fearful grief has grown familiar to me since I first felt it at the start of World War II, but at each of its returns it is worse. Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder. I
Wendell Berry
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
Woodrow Wilson
#13. World War Z was a great zombie film because those were zombie performances. It wasn't just a bunch of people walking around slow. They did close-ups on zombies who were performing, as a mindless dead thing. They were creepy and scary.
Tom Savini
#14. We are all proud of is World War II where we went in, we were decisive, we came to the conclusion that freedom prevailed, and we were heroes.
John F. Kerry
#15. I will be remembered when I'm in heaven. People won't remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#16. I hope the World War II generation doesn't lose that quality that made them so appealing: their modesty, and the way they are always looking forward and seldom back.
Tom Brokaw
#17. 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
#18. We got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.
George W. Bush
#19. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is ... is it not yet enough?
C.S. Lewis
#20. The big news is the midterm elections. Last night Republicans picked up a dozen seats in the House to give them their biggest majority since World War II. Or as they put it, 'Time to party like it's 1939!'
Jimmy Fallon
#21. Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.
Carl Sagan
#22. What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
Barry Commoner
#23. We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.
Rene Cassin
#24. We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war.
Muammar Al-Gaddafi
#25. What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time
Studs Terkel
#26. There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of.
Julie Burchill
#27. Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.
Buzz Aldrin
#28. 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
#29. I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
William Golding
#30. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
Annalee Newitz
#31. All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?
Studs Terkel
#32. Japan rose from the ashes of World War II as a 'trading state,' the model for export-led growth. It is not clear that the old export model of growth will be sustainable in a more 'balanced' global economy that does not rely so heavily on the U.S. consumer.
Robert Zoellick
#33. Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.
Antony Beevor
#34. My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#35. 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
#36. On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.
Eliot Engel
#37. I had a dream about you. We couldn't decide on a sunrise. You wanted a tan, I only cared about the view. Then World War III fulfilled both our desires.
Bauvard
#38. Widowhood conferred a mystery and status divorce lacked. The difference between returning World War II and Vietnam veterans. Both had been through a war, but a judgmental public conferred glory only on those who had been victimized in a socially acceptable manner.
Nevada Barr
#40. Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.
James D. Bradley
#42. During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.
Simon Sinek
#43. As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.
Ann Rinaldi
#44. After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.
Frans De Waal
#45. The D-Day moniker wasn't invented for the Allied invasion. The same name had been attached to the date of every planned offensive of World War II. It was first coined during World War I, at the U.S. attack at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in France in 1918.
Douglas Brinkley
#46. My father and all my uncles on both sides served in the military in World War II and Korea.
Darrell Issa
#47. During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
Lionel Blue
#48. World War III would become a great possibility, but such a scenario is quite possible under any new US administration ... To answer your question: business as usual.
Andre Vltchek
#49. Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks.
Walter Isaacson
#50. As a result of the World War and of a peace whose imperfections and risks are no longer denied by anyone, are we not even further away from the great aspirations and hopes for peace and fraternity than we were one or two decades ago?
Hjalmar Branting
#51. In the twenty-five years that have passed since the ending of the World War when the people of this country emerged from generations of humiliation under foreign occupation, we have accomplished much to our credit, overcome many difficulties and changed the course of our history.
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#52. I'm fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There's something about that period that's epic and tragic.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#53. Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there's a housing bubble and you'll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you'll have World War III. Been there, done that!
Jeremy Grantham
#54. If future generations ask us what we are fighting for [in World War Two], we shall tell them the story of Lidice.
Frank Knox
#55. The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
Adam Hochschild
#56. The only reason why world war 2 happened was because Chuck Norris decided to take a nap.
Lars Anderson
#58. Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
A.J.P. Taylor
#59. In what might come as a surprise to religious conservatives and other proponents of early marriage, Mintz reports that apart from the period following World War II, most Americans did not wed until their mid- or even late 20s or early 30s.
Anonymous
#60. English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War.
Kurt Vonnegut
#61. They came out over the highway and they stopped and that's when Barney got out, with the binoculars to try and identify the craft. I mean, he'd been in the military in World War Two, he's puzzled.
Betty Hill
#62. After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.
John Boyd Orr
#63. My greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.
Charles Bukowski
#64. On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.
Lyn Macdonald
#65. I only take vitamin B complex. Before World War II, I used to take ionized yeast, because in the pre-war era we never heard about vitamins.
John Gokongwei
#66. After World War II, American leaders were, in Dean Acheson's words, 'present at the creation' of a global order. Now at the end of the cold war, we desperately need that same vision, that leadership, that creativity to be applied to the governance of the global marketplace.
John J. Sweeney
#68. You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.
James Cagney
#69. 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
#70. After the Second World War, people in Japan no longer died for their country, and even that expression was no longer used.
Naoto Kan
#71. The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
Jill Lepore
#72. World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.
Margaret Drabble
#73. 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
#74. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.
Michael Ignatieff
#75. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Kurt Vonnegut
#76. President Bush paid homage Wednesday to World War II veterans of Normandy at the D-Day Memorial. Later that night, his twin daughters paid a special tribute to World War II veterans of the Pacific. They each downed two kamikazes.
Argus Hamilton
#77. war historian Paul Fussell suggests that in World War II heavy drinking was the answer to fear, boredom and the terrible damage to the sense of identity experienced by so many combatants. Drunkenness, he writes, did for the men of this war what drugs did for the next generation in Vietnam.
Liz Byrski
#79. 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
#80. We can have a new vision, one even greater than the system they gave us after World War II. Everyone can pursue happiness and freedom and peace.
Condoleezza Rice
#81. Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.
Neil Kinnock
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.
Rick Atkinson
#85. 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
#86. To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.
Ewa Kopacz
#87. The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.
Ruth Duccini
#88. I would like to invite everyone for the Third World War, but fight the war with love, not with the gun, to win the world peace. We all will be a winner.
Debasish Mridha
#89. The question is: how bad do things have to get before you will do something about it? Where is your line in the sand? If you don't enforce the constitutional limitations on your government very soon, you are likely to find out what World War III will be like.
Michael Badnarik
#90. This is not a must-win; World War II was a must-win (Referring to the Super Bowl)
Marv Levy
#91. Shina is the Japanese appellation for China most commonly used during the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II the name for China reverted to chugoku (Middle Kingdom), a common name from before the Meiji Restoration (1868).4
Stefan Tanaka
#92. As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
Adam Hochschild
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.
R. W. Apple Jr.
#96. In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.
Lee Kuan Yew
#97. When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.
Nick Nolte
#98. Emotions rage inside me, something like a world war twisting inside my stomach and poking holes in my lungs. I can't pick apart reality from fantasy - does that mean insanity isn't far from my reach?
K. Weikel
#99. Unless the peace that follows recognizes that the whole world is one neighborhood and does justice to the whole human race, the germs of another world war will remain as a constant threat to mankind.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#100. I was in psychological warfare in World War II, so I know psychological warfare when I see it.
Stefan Heym
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