World Quotes

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

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

The most important accomplishment, I believe, was my voting against the First World War.

~ Jeannette Rankin

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

~ George Will

Running for President is physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually the most demanding single undertaking I can envisage unless it's World War III.

~ Walter F. Mondale

In a world of inhumanity, war and terrorism, American citizenship is a very precious possession.

~ Phyllis Schlafly

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

~ Michael Chabon

As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.

~ Gustav Stresemann

I'm old enough to remember the end of World War II. On Aug. 14, 1946, a year after the Japanese were defeated, most newspapers and magazines had single articles commemorating the end of the war.

~ Harry Browne

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

We all want a world without war, without conflict, without human suffering.

~ Jeremy Gilley

Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.

~ Ben Shapiro

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.

~ Michael Korda

The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.

~ Robert Kennedy

Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.

~ Greg Grandin

Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.

~ Thor Heyerdahl

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

~ J. G. Ballard

In the World War nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.

~ J. F. C. Fuller

It's kind of a terrible irony, in a way, that the solution to America's problems was World War II.

~ William O'neill

But let there be no misunderstanding. The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or our struggle against the spread of Communism during the Cold War.

~ Jim Bunning

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

~ David Ignatius

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, 'New Museum,' to be an act of civil disobedience. It's not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It's painting as insurgency.

~ Richard Phillips

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

We can have a World War, I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have a World Party.

~ Vanna Bonta

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

The M-1 is the best tank in the world, if you can get it to the war in time, if you have a Saddam Hussein who'll give you seven months to move your forces in.

~ Ralph Peters

The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.

~ Clint Eastwood

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

~ Georg Solti

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

~ James A. Garfield

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

~ Barry Commoner

Since the Six-Day War, the whole world, which is the real arena of battle between us and the Palestinians, believes that Israel is right in regard to procedure, namely problems and disputes should be solved around the negotiating table.

~ Ehud Barak

The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.

~ Peter L. Bergen

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

~ Martin Scorsese

I want a world without war, a world without insanity. I want to see people do well. I don't even think it's as much as what I want for myself. It's more what I want for the people around me. That's what I want.

~ Tom Cruise

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

~ Joe Baca

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

~ C. L. R. James

It is inconceivable that even the gang who runs Russia would be willing to take on war, but one always has to remember that there seemed to be no reason in 1939 for Hitler to start war, and yet he did, and he started it with a world practically unprepared.

~ James Forrestal

The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.

~ Emily Greene Balch