Ww2 Quotes

“The Doctor: Amazing.
Nancy: What is?
The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me.”
― Steven Moffat

“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine

“War was funny like that: one minute you could try and block it and have the most wonderful thoughts, the next you were back in the nightmare.”
― Mark A. Cooper, The Edelweiss Express

“A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“They say 'stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage'. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn't capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.”
― Randall Wallace, Pearl Harbor

“After months of rumors, inference, and horrible miscalculations, the impossible had happened. The U.S. Pacific fleet lay twisted anad burning at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Had he been wrong about Japan not taking an offensive right now? God, he had thousands of men and women to think of, and he feared in his heart that it might not turn out the way he had seen it. He felt doomed, almost paralyzed by his gross miscalculation. He determined, however, that he would not let the word out about Pearl Harbor until he could meet with his American strategists and Philippine President Manuel Quezon.”
― Joyce Shaughnessy, Blessed Are the Merciful

“I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH).

From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits?

We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea?

What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?”
― Timothy James Dean, Teeth

“Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay - Winston Churchill”
― Stuart Finlay, What Churchill Would Do: Practical Business Advice Based on Winston's WW2 Wisdom

“That’s war. It won’t let anyone get away unscathed. I’m sorry about Grete.”

Verner aka ‘Jens’
in the novel 'the Informer' by Steen Langstrup”
― Steen Langstrup, The Informer

“God was not doing much at this juncture for his chosen people. Perhaps he was busy in some other corner of the world, or perhaps he wanted to let the people know they weren't so chosen after all? If a person can't trust the gods, how can he trust other people?”
― David Albahari, Gec i Majer; Kontrolni punkt

“History has no time for feelings, even less for trauma and pain, and least of all for dull helplessness, for the inability to grasp what is happening. One day you are a human being, and the next, despite the armband or perhaps precisely because of it, you are invisible. No, that is not history, it is a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, in which every individual is a separate cosmos. Nine thousand five hundred universes shift from a steady to a gaseous state, more than merely metaphorically, especially when you think of those five thousand souls who became acquainted with the back of Gotz and Meyer's truck.”
― David Albahari, Götz and Meyer

“[Vandenberg] said: "I do not know why we must be the only silent partner in this Grand Alliance. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in Moscow, when Moscow wants to assert unilateral war and peace aims which collide with ours. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in London, when Mr. Churchill proceeds upon his unilateral way to make decisions often repugnant to our ideas and ideals....
"Honest candor compels us to reassert in high places our American faith in the Atlantic Charter. These basic pledges cannot now be dismissed as a mere nautical nimbus. They march with our armies. They sail with our fleets...they sleep with our martyred dead. The first requisite of honest candor...is to relight this torch.
"I am not prepared to guarantee permanently the spoils of an unjust peace. It will not work. I am prepared by effective international cooperation to do our full part in charting happier and safer tomorrows.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This kind of peace

“That time will have come when our prison, which though extensive is nonetheless cramped and filled with suffocatingly stale air, has opened-that is, when the war raging at present has come to an end, one way or the other. And how that "or the other" sets me in terror of both myself and the awful straits into which fate has squeezed the German heart! For in fact I have only "the other" in mind; I am relying on it, counting solely on it, against my conscience as a citizen. After all, never-failing public indoctrination has made sure that we are profoundly aware of the crushing consequences, in all their irrevocable horror, of a German defeat, so that we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something that some of us fear-at certain moments that seem criminal even to ourselves, whereas others fear it quite frankly and permanently-fear more than a German defeat, and that is a German victory. I hardly dare ask myself to which of these two persuasions I belong. Perhaps to a third, in which one yearns for defeat constantly and consciously, but with unrelenting agony of conscience.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“During the war, the government could commit U.S. strength almost at will; anything could be justified as a war measure. The problem was how to get the same kind of acceptance for government interventionist policy when the shooting stopped.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“Just as Britain, bypassed, remained to become a floating arsenal and launching platform for Germany's destruction, a whole generation of Americans would have to wrestle with the islands of people and principle abandoned in Eastern Europe by Rooseveltian diplomacy.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“For the United States of America, remote in a hemisphere whose isolation the war had forever destroyed, World War II was mainly an expedition, a crusade of sorts to set to rights a world gone wrong. Many Americans equated the world's troubles with Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini - or some "ism" - and honestly expected that when the symptoms of the sickness were treated, a better day would surely dawn. Government propaganda, and even business advertising, continually bolstered this hope. It was an attitude among all parties, typically American, and in the light of American history and ethos, inevitable.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“The USSR, with its recent hisotry, national character, and current ideology, could not have desired a return to the status quo of 1937, and certainly not that of 1914. Americans should have seen this clearly, but did not. The USSR, as a nation, wanted a new order, like Roosevelt. But in this new order Russia would play the dominant role, and international justice had nothing to do with it.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“Some nations desire power, some seek it, and others have it thrust upon them. By 1945, there was no doubt in Russian minds about the reality of American power in the world. But there remained a very large question as to how Americans would use that power, or even if they would use it at all.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach

“I did not want a war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiations. After it had broken out, I did everything to assure victory. Since the three greatest powers on earth, together with many other nations, were fighting against us, we finally succumbed to their tremendous superiority. I stand up for the things that I have done, but I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to rob them, or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, its happiness, its freedom, and its life. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people to witness. (31 August 1946)”
― Hermann Göring, Trial of the Major war Criminals: before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946

“In the vast expanse of the Pacific, island hopping emerged as a stroke of strategic brilliance, enabling the Allied forces to bypass heavily fortified Japanese strongholds while securing key strategic points. This nimble and audacious approach not only conserved precious resources but also provided crucial bases for launching further offensives. Island hopping reshaped the trajectory of the Pacific War, illustrating the power of adaptability and innovation in the face of formidable adversaries.”
― Ian W. Toll

“Once war was over, everyone wanted to find some normality, to settle and fix their disordered homes. The reality, of course, was that it was impossible. Not with rationing and homes bombed and fathers not yet returned.”
― Lucy Ashe, The Sleeping Beauties

“It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.

[Winston Churchill, October 1942]”
― Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War

“He was still standing there, looking after me, a shadow except for his white shirtfront and pale head, a stray moonbeam hitting and lighting his golden hair. “I love you, I thought, although I didn’t speak the words. You’re beautiful and I’ll love you forever.”
― Margot Abbott, The Last Innocent Hour

“It is rather amazing that the Finns appeared not to have realized that their refusal to participate in operations against the Soviet Union after they had secured the lost territories at East Karelia that the achievement of their own goals was totally dependent on Germany achieving its goal of destroying the Soviet Union. Germany’s failure to do so, either because of a military defeat or because of a negotiated settlement would jeopardize Finland’s position. If Germany lost the war, the very existence of Finland came into question. It therefore made virtually no difference what the Finnish war aims were as they were intrinsically linked to those of Germany. It is nevertheless extraordinary that the Germans did not press the Finns for more definite answers regarding their participation in achieving the two main German objectives: operations against Leningrad, and the cutting of the Murmansk railroad. The failure to do so became a major bone of contention and should have been anticipated. Carl von Clausewitz wrote: ‘no war is begun, or at least no war should begin, if people acted wisely without first finding the answer to the question: what is to be attained by and in war?”
― Henrik O. Lunde, Finland's War Of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Coalition in World War II

“Open your eyes and see what you can, before you close them forever”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Signed First Edition Hardcover, Adult Contemporary Novel