1938 Quotes & Sayings

If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.' -From a speech by the president of Mount Holyoke College, as reported in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 13, 1938 — Francis Beauchesne Thornton

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

I read sometime around 1938 of Jewish fines and some street actions against them. But I was too concerned with U-Boats and the naval problems to be concerned about Jews. — Karl Donitz

You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler. — Milos Forman

It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious. — George Friedman

And you can really see in all of these issues that are priorities for Eleanor Roosevelt, where the compromises are painful, the compromises are hard, and the difficulties between them really begin to loom very large by 1936, by 1938. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

Bear Market Begin Bear Market End Max DD Sept 1929 June 1932 -86.25 July 1933 March 1935 -33.9% March 1937 March 1938 -54.5% Nov 1938 April 1942 -45.8% May 1946 June 1949 -29.6% July 1957 Oct 1957 -20.6% Dec 1961 June 1962 -28% Feb 1966 Oct 1966 -22.2% Oct 1968 May 1970 -34% Jan 1973 Oct 1974 -48.2% Sept 1976 March 1978 -19.4% Nov 1980 Aug 1982 -27.1% Aug 1987 Dec 1987 -40.4% July 1990 Oct 1990 -21.2% Mar 2000 Oct 2002 -49.1% June 2008 Mar 2009 -54% Average Bear Market: -37.3% Buy and Hold since 1942 Compounded Annual Rate of Return: 8.03% Maximum Draw down: 54% Prior to this decade's two severe bear markets, most investors believed that only that the stock market can go up. — Andrew Abraham

In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between. — Leslie Charteris

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938. — Bill Pascrell

In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave. — Stefan Zweig

EVER SINCE 29 SEPTEMBER, 1938, discussions about war and peace in Europe have revolved around the same, fearful question: will this be a Sarajevo or a Munich? In other words: can a great deal of diplomacy achieve a shaky balance, or must evil be crushed by force? We know that, in both cases, a war was the result, we know that everything went wrong afterwards, but each time we come back to those two cities, those contrapuntal reference points for the twentieth — Geert Mak

For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of Your Life, Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but himself for his child's actions:
It isn't up to the teachers in the schools, nor the Federal Radio Commissioners, nor anyone else on earth. It's up to us - it's our job! Our job to teach them right from wrong, honesty from dishonesty, a clean and intelligent attitude toward sex, a healthful fastidiousness about their own bodies. We can teach these things because we have the daily opportunity of knowing our children and their reactions. — Judith C. Waller

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
(America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938) — Pearl S. Buck

I wrote 'Turn Your Radio On' in 1937, and it was published in 1938. At this time radio was relatively new to the rural people, especially gospel music programs. I had become alert to the necessity of creating song titles, themes, and plots, and frequently people would call me and say, 'Turn your radio on, Albert, they're singing one of your songs on such-and-such a station.' It finally dawned on me to use their quote, 'Turn your radio on,' as a theme for a religious originated song, and this was the beginning of 'Turn Your Radio On' as we know it. — Albert E. Brumley

All right, let's consider some history here. I see a number of girls are wearing pants. This used to be frowned upon. In 1938, Helen Hulick was jailed for wearing slacks -- put behind bars.

Do you think society should have the right to jail or punish you for what you choose to wear? — Svetlana Chmakova

What mechanism can it be that results in the production of homologous organs, the same 'patterns', in spite of their not being controlled by the same genes? I asked this question in 1938, and it has not been answered — Gavin De Beer

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?' — Artie Shaw

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours. — Donald Hall

During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds were past 200 miles per house and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles ... In 1938, the hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under 10 feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact 5,000 miles away. — Sebastian Junger

the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held - to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler's surprise tour of the city - in the spring of 1938. — Tom Reiss

Hitler scheduled joint plebiscites in Austria and Germany for April 10, 1938. Both populations voted on whether to incorporate the two countries into a single state. The people of Austria cast 99.73 percent of their ballots in favor of Anschluss with Germany. The Germans voted 99.08 percent for unification.
...
On March 18. 1938, the German government notified the League of Nations that Austria had cancelled its affiliation. This international body, which had never manifest concern for the plight of the distressed little nation, now debated whether Germany was responsible for paying Austria's delinquent membership dues of 50,000 Swiss francs from January 1 to March 13. This ended the chain of circumstances leading to the unification of Hitler's homeland with the German Reich, an event known to history as "the rape of Austria. — Richard Tedor

In view of the experience I had acquired in the field of chemical industry, certain Italian government and industrial bodies entrusted me in 1938 with the task of instituting research and development studies on the production of synthetic rubber in Italy. — Giulio Natta

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. — Arthur Bryant

I remember mentioning to friends back in 1938 that the world chess champion would be beaten by a computer in 50 years time. Today we know computers are not far from this goal. — Konrad Zuse

It was done with respect for both tradition and the full array of Nazi panoply. The mood was jovial at the May 1938 laying of the VW factory's cornerstone as Hitler tried his Beetle's rear seating. Robert Ley and Ferdinand Porsche were the most prominent of those behind him. — Karl Ludvigsen

My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938. — George Stigler

I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them! (14th February 1945) — Adolf Hitler

Osborn was a founding partner of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO), but it was as an author that he really made his mark, beginning with the day in 1938 that a magazine editor invited him to lunch and asked what his hobby was. "Imagination," replied Osborn. — Susan Cain

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled "Junitaki Today." Of course, the book's "today" being 1970, it was hardly today's "today." Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a "today." And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history. — Haruki Murakami

Jews were segregated from 1933 on. We could only play against other Jewish teams. This wasn't just social segregation; this was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews. That's why my family left Germany in 1938. — Henry A. Kissinger

The three great moments of my life had to be the concerts of Ellington in 1938, Dizzy in '48, and Ella in '52. — Boris Vian

In 1938, Louise Rosenblatt introduced reader response theory or the transactional view of reading. She asserted that what the reader brings to the reading act - his or her world of experiences, personality, and current frame of mind - is just as important in interpreting the text as what the author writes. According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader. — Carl M. Tomlinson

Detective Comics first appeared in 1937. Superman, written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made his debut in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. Superman was unstoppable; soon, a million Superman comics were being sold every month.45 — Jill Lepore

Beetles were made from 1938, in pre-war Nazi controlled Germany. The few actual civilian cars that were produced were used as staff cars and propaganda tools. It is a well known fact that not one of the original civilian orders for the cars were ever fulfilled, at least until the 1960's when a law suit brought about a settlement for a small number of successful claimants. — Christina Engela

We were just emerging from the Depression. Superman started in 1938. Batman started in 1939. So, we were just recovering. — Jerry Robinson

My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old. — Tom Brokaw

I then remained in Berlin until Dec. 1938, spending my time between pictures at my villa on the Riviera. — Pola Negri

Before World War II, there was no such thing as organic food. All food was organic. Food was just food - plants, grains, meats, and dairy that we could all recognize or grow. There were no long lists of ingredients on packages that you couldn't pronounce, much less have any idea what they did to your body or the environment. In 1938, the USDA's Yearbook of Agriculture was called Soils and Men, and it remains a handbook of organic farming today, but back then that was the norm. — Nora Pouillon

A huge segment of the country has always felt overtaxed. In 1938, when taxes were roughly 17% of income, a 'Fortune' survey found that nearly half of all Americans thought they paid too much relative to what they got in return. — Nina Easton

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the "Jean Arthur character," was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra's rendition of Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). "Jean Arthur is my favorite actress," said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. " ... push that neurotic girl ... in front of the camera ... and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress." Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice. — Eve Golden

In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord's. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents. — Rodney Ulyate

You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. In Nazi Germany in 1933, people wore lapel pins that said "Yes" during the elections and referendum that confirmed the one-party state. In Austria in 1938, people who had not previously been Nazis began to wear swastika pins. What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion. In the Europe of the 1930s and '40s, some people chose to wear swastikas, and then others had to wear yellow stars. — Timothy Snyder

countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler's evil intentions. 'Hitler's terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,' Churchill believed. And: 'Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.' In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to — Geert Mak

If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride. — J.R.R. Tolkien

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
(Great Thought, February 19, 1938) — Raymond Chandler

We can also express it like this: the difficulties, which this boy has with himself as well as with his relationship to the world, are the price he has to pay for his special gifts. (Asperger 1938, p.2) — Tony Attwood

Anna Marie Hahn begged and screamed for her life as she was being strapped into the electric chair. On December 7, 1938 she became the first woman in the state of Ohio to be executed. The last word goes to Arsenic Anna herself: "God above will tell me what made me do these terrible things. I couldn't have been in my right mind when I did them. I love all people so much. — Les Macdonald

'The Sound of Music' is set in 1938 in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. — Alexander Hanson

My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away. — Shalom Auslander

Today the Republican Party attracts neither the farmer nor the industrial worker. Why not? To represent the people one must know them. Lincoln did. The Republican Party leadership does not. The greatest praise I can give Lincoln on this his anniversary is to say he would be ashamed of his party's leadership today. - 1938 — George David Aiken

British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere. — Gary Taubes

If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls.
Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk to Lord Halifax as reaction to announcement of allies' betrayal in 1938. — Jan Masaryk

Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol.
Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938 — C. G. Jung

History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939. — Garry Kasparov

The year that Rutherford died (1938) there disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force. She has become rich but she has become enslaved and part of her is veiled in secrecy. I do not know whether Rutherford would continue to joke and laugh as he used to. — Pyotr Kapitsa

And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time. — Winston S. Churchill

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be. — Niall Ferguson

I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938. — George Stigler

I have never concealed the fact and said it before the court in 1938 that I came from an anti-Semitic past and tradition ... I ask only that you look at my life historically and take it as history. I believe that from 1933 I truly represented the Lutheran-Christian outlook on the Jewish question as I revealed before the court but that I returned home after eight years' imprisonment as a completely different person. — Martin Niemoller

I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries. — Eric Kandel

Kazan was an old friend, I met him in 1938. He picked up radio jobs for eating money, so I met him on a couple of radio shows. Later on I was in a play he directed. — Richard Widmark

In 1938, I was given a one-year teaching appointment, which was sensational for British universities. This was converted into the usual four-year contract for an Assistant Lecturer in 1939. — Arthur Lewis

One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along. 1937 and 1938 were the years when the interest in this whole subject was born.

from "Guidelines for Black Books: An Open Letter to Juvenile Editors" (1969) in Children and Literature (1973) — Augusta Baker

I always felt that Bette Davis was one of the great screen actresses who never really got her due - she won two Oscars, but the last was in 1938, and that was really before all the great work that she did. — Robert Osborne

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. — Ray Bradbury

Look at the films of Walt Disney: 'Snow White' came out in February 1938, and I can't think of another film from that year that's watched as much. The same is true of 'Bambi,' 'Dumbo' ... even, frankly, 'Toy Story,' which is probably watched more than any other movie of 1995. — John Lasseter

There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and -fatally enough- also its subject. There is no getting away from this fact.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.8 — C. G. Jung

The United States turned its back on the Jewish people and an awesome tragedy occurred, starting a pattern that continues until this day. There are literally dozens of examples like the Great Hurricane of 1938 where disasters strike America on the very day the United States meddles with God's covenant land of Israel. — John P. McTernan

American Christians have been woefully silent on important issues. I am an American citizens now, and I love this country, but I see symptoms in the United States that I saw in Austria in 1938 when the Nazi Germans were terrorizing Europe. — Maria Von Trapp

[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation. — Michael Chabon

This must be a good book," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted - slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. — John Steinbeck

Vijay Singh won a playoff in 2004 at Whistling Straits after a final-round 76, which was the highest last round by the winner of any major since 1938, when Reg Whitcombe won the British Open with a 78 in a storm that blew down the exhibition tent at Sandwich. — Dan Jenkins

In 1938 ... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit. — Laura Hillenbrand

I was born in London, England, in 1938, a few months before the war, and spent the first years of my life there, although I was evacuated a couple of times for short periods. My schooling was very interrupted, both by frequent moves and by ill health. — Anne Perry

What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation. — Nicholson Baker

Arrau performed complete cycles of the Beethoven Sonatas, first in Mexico City in 1938 and later in Buenos Aires, London, and New York. — Victoria A Von Arx

By 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt was so angry at FDR's policies, she writes a book called This Troubled World. And it is actually a point-by-point rebuttal of her husband's foreign policy. We need collective security. We need a World Court. We need something like the League of Nations. We need to work together to fight fascism. We need embargoes against aggressor nations, and we need to name aggressor nations. All of which is a direct contradiction of FDR's policies. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

Today in May 1938, the world around us suffers from the anxiety which the unemployment of millions brings with it. In Germany we begin to be anxious because we have not enough workmen. — Adolf Hitler

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead ... Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive ... he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of.
- From 'Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica', Zora Neale Hurston, 1938 — Charles A. Cornell

When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. — Bette Midler

Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories. — Raymond Louis Wilder

In 1938, I. G. Farben sent a letter to (a major drug firm), one of its American subsidiaries, (that)..all advertising contracts must contain ' ... a legal clause whereby the contract is immediately cancelled if overnight the attitude of the paper toward Germany should be changed. — G. Edward Griffin

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

Internet pharmacies return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. That law established federal requirements for drug safety and labeling but exempted prescription medicines from the labeling rules. — Virginia Postrel

All the publicity, the attention, the interviews, the photographs, were too much for me (after throwing his second no-hitter in 1938). — Johnny Vander Meer