1939 Quotes & Sayings

Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939 — Jimmy Doolittle

39 After almost two decades of productive revisionism, it is surely time to return our focus squarely to the consequences of America's flawed hegemony in the 1920s, as classically outlined by C. P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, 1986) and elaborated by Link, Stabilisierungspolitik, and Costigliola, Awkward Dominion. — Anonymous

Set between England and the Spanish Canary Islands, three women learn the truth about their shared past, and discover the importance of family. Spain, 1939. Following the wishes of her parents to keep her safe during the war, a young girl, Julia, enters a convent in Barcelona. — Rosanna Ley

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. — Thomas Pynchon

Every defeat of the capitalist class is a defeat for fascism. Every time the workers obtain a reduction in their hours of work and a rise in salaries, every time they affirm workers' solidarity by defending a victimised fellow worker, every time they abolish degrading methods of production, every time they achieve a victory over their boss, they win a victory against fascism and pave the way to socialism.

THE LEFT & WORLD WAR II: Selections from the Anarchist Journal 'War Commentary' 1939-1943 — Marie Louise Berneri

ToScottie March 11, 1939 p. 387- 388

And please do not leave good books half- finished, you spoil them for yourself...Don't be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them! — F Scott Fitzgerald

And the one here in my hand isn't brown and shiny like the rest. It is flat and sleepy like the sand, which through my fingers I set rolling. Slowly, step by step, as if unwilling I let my feet wander on, ahead. (September 24, 1939) p. 7 — Pearl Fichman

I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children. — Ada Yonath

Jack Byrne's Fiction House became known for its powerful, invincible female heroes. At a time when many publishers had none, Fiction House employed more than twenty women artists.46 The popularity of comics soared. Gaines, who did not tend to hire women to do anything except secretarial work, began publishing All-American Comics in 1939. That same year, Superman became the first comic-book character to have an entire comic book all to himself; he could also be heard on the radio.47 The first episode of Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May 1939. Three months later, Byrne Holloway Marston, staff artist for the Marston Chronicle, drew the first installment of The Adventures of Bobby Doone. — Jill Lepore

In 1939 Winston Churchill, describing the 5000-mile peaceful border dividing Canada and the United States, said, 'That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations, is an example to every country and a pattern for the future of the world. — Ronald Reagan

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. — Hilary Mantel

I am trying now to re-create in my mind the picture of the man as I saw him in 1939- he, the revered author of Sinister Barriers, I the novice. I think I can rely on my near-photographic memory for the purpose. (I call it "near-photographic" because I can only remember things that happen to be lying around near photographs.)

Let's see, as I recall, he is six-feet seven-inches tall (when he is sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then, too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke. — Isaac Asimov

Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union ... Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday. — Tony Horwitz

In 1939 I hadn't even realized that this was an immigration problem. — Leslie Charteris

I make out a schoolbus ... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it. — Tom Wolfe

National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our population favored a similar course for America. — Charles Lindbergh

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that. — Eugene Jarecki

It's like Gone with the Wind or something. Strictly the 1939 brand of slapping. It only works because the slapper loves the slapee, and the slappee knows it. — A.S. King

was January 1939. — Markus Zusak

On 24 August 1939, as an officer in the reserve, I had to join my regiment in Potsdam. — Hans Frank

Norbert Wiener," Tillingford said. "You recall his work in cybernetics. And, even more important, Enrico Destini's work in the field of theophonics." "What's that?" Tillingford raised an eyebrow. "You are a specialist, my boy. Communication between man and God, of course. Using Wiener's work, and using the invaluable material of Shannon and Weaver, Destini was able to set up the first really adequate system of communication between Earth and Heaven in 1946. Of course, he had the use of all that equipment from the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns." "You mean the - Nazis?" "I'm familiar with that term. That's sociologist jargon, isn't it? And that Denier of the Prophet, that Anti-Bab. They say he's still alive down in Argentina. Found the elixir of eternal youth or something. He made that pact with the devil in 1939, you remember. Or was that before your time? But you know about it - it's history." "I — Philip K. Dick

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [ ... ] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was. — Salman Rushdie

1939 and the children of Britain are on the move. David and Frankie, two boys from the East End of London, are thrown together by chance. Totally opposite in temperament an character, they form an unlikely friendship. This friendship is compromised by the presence of Elizabeth; who test their loyalties to the limit. — Terry Knowles

I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know. — Quincy Jones

Anyone who remembered the grim, gun-toting, thug-murdering Batman of 1939 could see that he'd become a fundamentally different guy: a grinning, lantern-jawed, wisecracking adventure hero who'd left that emo "creature of the night" shtick far behind. — Glen Weldon

It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures ... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.' — Tove Jansson

In 1939 I wrote my first article ("Intime banaliteter" [Intimate banalities] in the journal Helhesten ) in which I expressed my love for sofa painting, and for the last twenty years I have been preoccupied with the idea of rendering homage to it. Thus I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection. Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting. — Asger Jorn

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy. — Robert Kiyosaki

When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions. — John Mearsheimer

I learned by transcribing songs out of the Library of Congress collection in Washington where I was working. I got a job when I just turned twenty in 1939 and Alan [Lomax] needed some help. I listened to hundreds of records every week. — Pete Seeger

I was born on September 30, 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ, and became, later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and the shop. — Jean-Marie Lehn

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

But the ensemble's greatest legacy can be found in the lives it saved during the Holocaust. By helping the musicians as well as their family members immigrate to Palestine, Huberman saved an estimated one thousand lives between 1935 and 1939. The — James A. Grymes

Beginning in 1939, there were events well to the east of Istanbul that seems to have started a progressive sequence to the west. The question is, will the sequence continue further ... Unfortunately, we think the answer is yes. — Thomas Parsons

British General Andrew Skeen, who faced a similar military mission in 1939, wrote, "When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire. — Eric Blehm

It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists." [519] — George F. Kennan

With the coming of the war the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically. It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile force. On September 5, 1939 Chaim Weizmann, the principal Zionist leader, had declared war against Germany on behalf of the world's Jews, stating that "the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies... The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilising Jewish man-power, technical ability, resources etc." (Jewish Chronicle, September 8, 1939, pp. 7, 29). DETENTION OF ENEMY ALIENS All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German Reich and, as a — Richard Harwood

OUT TODAY - THE NEW POCKET BOOK THAT MAY REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICA'S READING HABITS' (from a 1939 Pocket Book advertisement) — Woody Haut

I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939 ... His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world ... I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time. — Matthew Fox

In his book Defying Hitler, written in British exile in 1939, Sebastian Haffner recalled the "icy fright" that had been his first reaction to the news that Hitler had been named chancellor: "For a moment I almost physically sensed the odour of blood and filth surrounding this man Hitler. It was a bit like being approached by a threatening and disgusting predator - it felt like a dirty paw with sharp claws in my face." But — Volker Ullrich

What man can quote a scene from the 1939 film classic? That does not happen in real life, hell, it doesn't even happen in books. I halted hastily in the middle of the parking lot. Of course - it was obvious as a hooker at a debutant ball - Hunter. Was. Gay. — Genna Rulon

I was born in Montreal in 1939, the second son of poor immigrants. — Sidney Altman

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, a traumatic shock to me, ended any ambivalence I had about the Soviet Union, and all cooperation with Communists in united fronts. — Roger Nash Baldwin

My favorite movie is 'The Women' from 1939. It's been my favorite movie since I was like 12 years old. I love the dialogue, really. It's just a lot of really strong female performances. Rosalind Russell kills it, you know. — Anna Kendrick

Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop. — Jack Kerouac

In 1916, Infants' and Children's Wear Review insisted upon pink for boys and blue for girls. In 1939, Parents magazine claimed that pink was a good color for boys because it was a pale version of red, which was the color of Mars, the war god. Blue was good for girls because it was the color of Venus, and of the Virgin Mary. So, pink for girls is a relatively recent trend, and utterly random. — Tim Gunn

After taking my B.A. degree in 1939 I remained at the University for a further year to take an advanced course in Biochemistry, and surprised myself and my teachers by obtaining a first class examination result. — Frederick Sanger

When Mussolini decided on war he did not take my advice or that of any other Army chief. In August 1939 the Duce had not been so sure about the invincibility of the Germans, and he told us that he had sought to persuade Hitler not to act. — Pietro Badoglio

Our part of Poland was under Russian occupation from 1939-1941. — Roald Hoffmann

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

If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance. — Mike Nichols

She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World's Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon. been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard. — Carl Sagan

10 August, 1939

Confession: I am nineteen years old, and I've been kissed many times. But I've never been kissed like that.

It felt like drowning but not needing to breathe. Like falling but never hitting the ground. Even now, my hands are shaking, and my heart is so swollen and fat it feels like it's going to burst, or I'm going to burst. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to bury my head in my pillow and scream until I fall asleep, because maybe when I go to sleep I can relive it.
I can't believe it happened, yet I think I've been waiting for it to happen for the last seven years, ever since I conned Angelo into kissing me the first time. I've been waiting for him for so long, and for a couple of hours tonight, in a little world that was only big enough for the two of us, he was mine.
But I don't know if I will be able to keep him. I'm afraid when tomorrow comes, I'll be waiting for him again.
Eva Rosselli — Amy Harmon

The Big Book's chapter We Agnostics draws a line in the sand: God either is or He isn't. What was our choice to be (Alcoholics Anonymous, 53)? Nature abhors a vacuum and a state of nothing can't exist in either the material or spiritual world. This kind of binary thinking made sense in the autocratic world of 1939. But in a democratic, pluralist society, all-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion - a philosophical assumption that everything is right or wrong, good or evil, superior or inferior. In this millennium, people can hold opposing views and be equals in the same community. Our Traditions, lovingly and tolerantly, make room for more than one truth. That's a good thing, because the only problem with the truth is that there are so many versions of it. — Joe C.

April 20, 1939 1' The [Nazi] movement for freeing the world from the Jews is a movement for the renaissance of human dignity. The all-wise and Almighty God is behind this movement. - Fr. Franjo Kralik in a Zagreb Catholic newspaper, 19412 RIDES THE BEAST — Dave Hunt

In 1939, Hitler expanded the German Navy and, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Germany then established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This protectorate included those portions of Czechoslovakia that had not already been incorporated into Germany. On August 30, 1939, the German Reich issued an ultimatum to Poland concerning the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. On September 1st, without waiting for a response to its ultimatum, Germany invaded Poland. Much to Hitler's surprise, England honored its treaty with Poland. Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thereby ushering in another World War. Officially, "The Second World War" in Europe was started by the German Reich when it attacked Poland, although at the time Germany blamed the Treaty of Versailles. — Hank Bracker

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

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, "are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939) — Jorge Luis Borges

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 AMA virtually stopped the Rife treatment in 1939, first by threatening the physicians using Rife's instrument, then by forcing Rife into court ... During the period 1935 to early 1939, the leading laboratory for electronic or energy medicine in the USA, in New Jersy, was independently verifying Rife's discoveries ... (this) laboratory was "mysteriously" burned to the ground ... Rife's treatment was ruthlessly suppressed by the AMA's Morris Fishbein. — Barry Lynes

We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood. — Irwin Rose

Resistance, however, is useless. (1939) — A.E. Van Vogt

For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures. — Max Perutz

R. C. Sproul (theologian & pastor; b. 1939): "We are persuaded that the biblical mandate is still in effect... If there's ever an indication of a perpetual ordinance in the church, it is that which is based on an appeal to Creation... I don't think it matters one bit whether it's a babushka, a veil, or a hat, but I think that the symbol should remain intact as a sign of our obedience to God."[150] — David Phillips

1939 New York World's Fair, — Stephen E. Ambrose

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939 ... from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat. — Maurice Cowling

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939. — Heinrich Boll

Ephraim found a stack of postcards tied together with a faded green ribbon. He shuffled through them and found they were from every World's Fair from 1915 in San Francisco to 1939 in New York. None of the postcards hed been written on or mailed. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe. — Norman Davies

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm. — Gore Vidal

If every other Jew had a weapon in 1939, there wouldn't be a Holocaust. — Janusz Korwin-Mikke

I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939. — Martin Ryle

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. It can't happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances. By — Margaret Atwood

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. — Margaret Atwood

The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. — Tim Powers

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU's tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these — Vasily Grossman

As a very young man I signed a declaration - 'I renounce war and will never support another'. That was in 1939 and I have maintained this stand throughout the whole period, including WW2, as a Conscientious Objector.Worked to achieve Peace since. It is necessary for individuals to take this stand and maintain it. War never solves anything - it accentuates any problem, whatever it is, and makes matters worse. There is no moral or humanitarian justification for it. — Donald Saunders

If we had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. — Adolf Hitler

From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans. — Maurice Cowling

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop.
[New Statesman interview, 7 January 1939] — Winston S. Churchill

We ... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children. — Peter Shaffer

How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939?

I remember.

I should remember.

I started it.

My name is Robert Leroy Parker. — Daniel DeLacy

The Sorrow of Love
W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world's tears,
And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,
And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves
Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry. — W.B.Yeats

If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of criminal acts reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying - that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 - establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime. — Orrin Hatch

(Shortly after Germany forced Denmark to sign a non-aggression pact in 1939) How nice. Now the Germans can sleep in peace, knowing that they will not be invaded by us. — Victor Borge

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

Without the Fender bass, there'd be no rock n' roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting 'round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything. — Quincy Jones

Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving. — Graham Moore

The red library is Sui's tribute to fashion maven Diana Vreeland, who served as editor for Harper's Bazaar (1939-1962) and Vogue (1963-1961). My most precious collection is my bound Vogue magazines, .. and they're kind of like my Bible. I look at them all the time when I'm trying to inspire myself for a collection. — Anna Sui

What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop's proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war. — Timothy Snyder

Then Susan suggested a new dress. I reminded her that the Queen was very happy wearing her 1939 wardrobe, so why shouldn't I be? She said the Queen doesn't need to impress strangers - but I do. I felt like a traitor to crown and country; now decent woman has new clothes - but I forgot that the moment I saw myself in the mirror. — Mary Ann Shaffer

All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable and politically senseless, harmful and dangerous. — Vladimir Putin

and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important — Diane Ackerman

I didn't know a thing about Oxford and had never been to Britain. My father suggested it because in 1939 he had been about to take up a place at Wadham College, but the war broke out, and he joined the Army instead. — Tariq Ali

Between 1939 and 1945 you produced weapons and war equipment valued at thirteen billion dollars, 70 per cent of which you shipped to your allies. The same process is going on today in Canada's much larger and growing industry. — Arthur Hays Sulzberger

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs. — Harold E. Varmus

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. — J.R.R. Tolkien

LULL
(November, 1939)

The winds of hatred blow
Cold, cold across the flesh
And chill the anxious heart;
Intricate phobias grow
From each malignant wish
To spoil collective life.
Now each man stands apart.

We watch opinion drift,
Think of our separate skins.
On well-upholstered bums
The generals cough and shift
Playing with painted pins.
The arbitrators wait;
The newsmen suck their thumbs.
The mind is quick to turn
Away from simple faith
To the cant and fury of
Fools who will never learn;
Reason embraces death,
While out of frightened eyes
Still stares the wish to love. — Theodore Roethke

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.] — William Shockley