Wwii Quotes

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.

~ Louis Zamperini

I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.

~ Diet Eman

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: The church may not mix in politics. he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God. -From the diary of Diet Eman

~ Diet Eman

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can't touch a hair on my head without the will of God my Father, because He is on my side.

~ Diet Eman

By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been a very valuable Gestapo person.

~ Diet Eman

Yesterday the paper had a short summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still aloud: in their houses and in the streets! God, punish those who are persecuting the people you chose and to whom Jesus also belonged. -From the diary of Diet Eman

~ Diet Eman

After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.

~ Diet Eman

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.— Winston S. Churchill

~ Ellen Brazer

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.Surely, while we live we are not lost.Oh Janos, Janos my brother!Surely we are not lost--while we live.

~ John Hepworth

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls

~ Mervyn Peake

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

~ Kristina Mcmorris

here’s a toast to Alan Turingborn in harsher, darker timeswho thought outside the containerand loved outside the linesand so the code-breaker was brokenand we’re sorryyes now the s-word has been spokenthe official conscience woken– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –and the story does suggesta part 2 to the Turing Test:1. can machines behave like humans?2. can we?

~ Matt Harvey

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

~ David Brooks

My parents didn't settle for the lives their parents lived. They stepped out and up, my father lying his way into the Navy when he was too young to enlist, my mother marrying this fugitive from the mills when she was too young for marriage. A smart guy, he took every course the Navy offered, aced them all, becoming the youngest chief warrant officer in the service. After Pearl Harbor the Navy needed line officers fast and my dad was suddenly wearing gold stripes.My mother watched and learned, getting good at the ways of this new world. She dressed beautifully. Our quarters were always handsomely fitted out. She and Dad were gracious, well-spoken.They were far from rich, but there were books and there was music and sometimes conversations about the world. We even listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturdays.Still, when I finished high school, their attitudes and the times said that there was little point in further educating a girl. I would take a clerical job until I could find the right junior officer to marry and pursue his career, as helpmeet. If I picked well and worked hard, I might someday be an admiral's wife.

~ Ann Medlock

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.

~ Markus Zusak

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril, he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

~ Joseph Heller

We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good. -from her blog

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically.

~ Eugene B. Sledge

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.

~ Iain Pears

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

~ Iain Pears

In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch

~ Bertrand Russell

A third-grader when WWII started, I was also waging my own war effort. It was deeply magical thinking—I really thought what I did or didn't do could save lives, win battles, bring my dad and uncles home safe. And conversely, that if I screwed up, they were all in greater danger.

~ Ann Medlock

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

~ Anthony Doerr

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation’s internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people?

~ Nel Noddings

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

~ John Hersey

All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.

~ Noël Coward

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white

~ Mervyn Peake

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

~ Winston S. Churchill

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

~ Winston S. Churchill

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly.Grandpa wanted to do his part too.

~ Kara Martinelli

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

~ Randall Wallace

Here. Here I am.You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.

~ Bruno Apitz

That was my story. Or at least the way I remember it. What happened to those characters and the places that had to do with those turbulent times, can be researched in libraries or the memories of the elderly. People like Beigbeder, Rosalinda, or Hillgarth went on to the history books.People like Marcus and me didn't. But that doesn't mean our lives were less important. Because, in the end, we all play a part in the world's fate. And Marcus and I always stood on the other side of the story.Actively invisible during that time we lived in between the seams.

~ María Dueñas

War is a lie

~ Claude Beccai

Although Higgins's men had finally received some badly needed supplies, some of his wounded were becoming critical, and the overall health of his troops continued to ebb. Meanwhile, the price among the 442nd's battalions paid to reach Higgins's men had reached gut-wrenching levels. And for General Dahlquist, panic would supplant his anger and frustration.

~ Scott Mcgaugh

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

~ A.e. Samaan

When the big German guns at Calais fired on us, we realized, we had been strafed by Spitfires from the RAF during working up exercises for the invasion, accidentally attacked by the USN off Normandy after D-Day and shelled by the British Army in the English Channel. It was about time the enemy took a few shots at us too!Jack Harold, RCNVR, SignalmanHMCS TRENTONIANChapter 9, White Ensign Flying -The Story of HMCS TRENTONIAN.

~ Roger Litwiller

Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.

~ Corrie Ten Boom

But miracles still happen, even if we don't think they do.

~ Diet Eman