Quotes & Sayings About Wartime

It does seem to produce more creative results when there are limitations. It's like in wartime with rations - people became more inventive with cooking. — Laura Fraser

I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous. — Laura Carmichael

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles ... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.. — Milan Kundera

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. — Winston S. Churchill

Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening. — Ann Coulter

In wartime, everyone's birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad. — Danny M. Cohen

There's peacetime and there's wartime, and you don't need polarization on wartime issues. You need polarization on all other issues. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor ... of the government's ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being. — William Rehnquist

The snow, the effect of concealment and secrecy it creates, makes him think of the brutality of the wartime legislation to forbid and violently extract secrets. It is as if the hushed white landscape is showing how sacrosanct are our secrets, how much of our vitality is bound up in them. — Glenn Haybittle

Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but "guts and glory." Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious.
But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence. — Boria Sax

In all things we become acclimated; this is our strength in wartime, and also our weakness. What is a principle, if it alter with circumstance?
But what is a man, if he cannot change to meet changed times?
And if he can change to meet changed times, is he a man, or several in succession? — M T Anderson

Her body lies in the bed like an inanimate object, an emptied bellow or shopping bag. Nothing has changed with her departure from the camp. Her body is still in their power, even more so now. Only now does S. understand that a woman's body never really belongs to the woman. It belongs to others - to the man, the children, the family. And in wartime to soldiers. — Slavenka Drakulic

It proved what he had always instinctively known.

Love is Forever. — Anne Rouen

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President. — Lyndon B. Johnson

To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights. — Gore Vidal

McCrae was the kind of southerner who had only left the parish of his birth to serve his country in wartime or to carry bulls across the state for mating purposes. — Greg Iles

I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it. — Henry A. Kissinger

Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this. — Paul Auster

The animosity that the overwhelming majority of Americans felt toward domestic communists and their sympathizers between 1917 and 1944 - an attitude that typically was more intense and more consistent than the public's generally distrustful but varying views of the U.S.S.R. - helps to explain why America's international/domestic Cold War developed so swiftly after the wartime alliance with Russia ended. U.S.-Soviet — Ralph B. Levering

The suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench; — Donna Tartt

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime — Ben Horowitz

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game. — Ben Macintyre

As zookeepers, the Zabinskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey. — Diane Ackerman

The greatly increased consumption of alcoholic beverages is very largely a direct result of the increased purchasing power created by wartime expenditures. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

I have noticed, with much distress, the excessive wartime activity of the investigating bureaus of Congress and the administration, with their impertinent and indecent searching out of the private lives and the past political beliefs of individuals. — Wendell Willkie

I'm a terrible person,' Pierrot said to her.
'I'm quite wicked too', Rose said, and she smiled at him.
Pierrot knew that Rose was punished every time she spoke to him. All her words were contraband, treasured items from the black market. A sentence from her was like a pot of jam during wartime. — Heather O'Neill

Nor do we begin to have a clear appreciation of what the increase in consumption of alcoholic beverages in wartime means in increased risk, and in loss of efficiency to the fighting and working forces of the country. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. — Andrew Sullivan

These days the integrity of our small but ancient civilization is endangered by the excesses of a country whose wartime budget is larger than that of the other nine leading military powers of the world, combined. — Julian Aguon

My wartime experiences developing a code that utilized the Navajo language taught how important our Navajo culture is to our country. For me that is the central lesson: that diverse cultures can make a country richer and stronger. — Chester Nez

He stretched, ate his last bite of fungal curds, drank the dregs of something not entirely unlike coffee, and headed out to keep peace in wartime. — James S.A. Corey

Life is war. That's not all it is. But it is always that. Our weakness in prayer is owing largely to our neglect of this truth. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief. — John Piper

No census was taken of the number of gay men and lesbians who entered the military. But if Alfred Kinsey's wartime surveys were accurate and applied as much to the military as to the civilian population, at least 650,000 and as many as 1.6 million male soldiers were homosexual. — Allan Berube

In order to have enough of the raw materials ... which will be lacking in wartime, we should plan to acquire and use foreign resources existing in our expected sphere of influence, such as Sakhalim, China, and the Southern Pacific. — Sadao Araki

Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. — Hunter S. Thompson

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't. — Walter Isaacson

Tommy and I put on a radio play to entertain everyone while they unpacked their cookies. It was about a girl who saves up money for a prom dress, but at the last minute she says, "It's only clothes," and buys war bonds instead. The play was a big success, and my whole school pledged to buy war bonds, which should have made me happy. But it gave me a queer feeling; it's easy to write propaganda when everyone agrees with you. Do you understand? I think I'd rather bake cookies; it feels more honest.
Your friend,
Lulu


Sammy looked down at me. "A girl after your own heart!" he said. "In my experience it is a rare female who can say, 'It's only clothes,' and when the war came, you discovered who you really were. Women changed. Children grew up overnight. I wonder what happened to this one. — Ruth Reichl

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature. — Winston Churchill

The country was at war, but for most people the war was more an idea than an experience, and I felt something between anger and shame that Americans - that I - could sometimes ignore its impact for days at a time. In Croatia, life in wartime had meant a loss of control, war holding sway over every thought and movement, even while you slept. — Sara Novic

In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves. — George Herbert Mead

Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, 'Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!' And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller. — Kristin Cashore

Getting emotional about things is a peacetime luxury. In wartime, it's much too painful. — Edmund H. North

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don't call a death murder. — Sara Sheridan

Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees. — Robert Winston

See Cook [op.cit.] for a discussion of Huygens's unusual wartime visit to Cambridge and the Royal Society. His philosophical contretemps with Isaac Newton in 1675 (referenced in Society minutes as "The Great Corpuscular Debate") would mark the last significant intellectual discourse between England and the continent prior to the chaos of the Interregnum and the Annexation . . . Some Newton biographers [Winchester (1867), &c] indicate Huygens may have used his sojourn in Cambridge to access Newton's alchemical journals and that key insights derived thusly may have been instrumental to Huygens's monumental breakthrough. However, cf. Hooft [1909] and references therein for a critique of the forensic alchemy underlying this assertion. From Freeman, Thomas S., A History of the Pre-Annexation England from Hastings to the Glorious Revolution, 3 Vols. New Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1918. — Ian Tregillis

This is death during wartime and it is capricious as shit. — Matt Fraction

The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or Gettysburg, or Saratoga. — Jim Wright

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments. — Bill Kristol

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty. — Meg Wolitzer

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime. — Jay-Z

My decision to begin research in radio astronomy was influenced both by my wartime experience with electronics and antennas and by one of my teachers, Jack Ratcliffe, who had given an excellent course on electromagnetic theory during my final undergraduate year. — Antony Hewish

The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools. — Benjamin Disraeli

In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns. — Sara Sheridan

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there. — Nicole Mones

With a practised hand he pulls out a knife and presses it against her throat. Hurry up, he hisses through clenched teeth, hurry up! At that same instant she is again struck by their inability to express themselves in normal sentences; they use only monosyllabic words, as if they have forgotten how to speak. And perhaps they have. Perhaps that happens to people in wartime, words suddenly become superfluous because they can no longer express reality. Reality escapes the words we know, and we simply lack new words to encapsulate this new experience. — Slavenka Drakulic

I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them. — Shinzo Abe

To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls - deceptions, in a less charitable assessment - to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. — Scott Anderson

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation - the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No — Jonathan Littell

Even bullying was important to Wonder Woman, and in Sensation Comics #23 she stopped a gang who were picking on a young boy, showed the head bully the error of his ways and learned about his home situation, spoke to his father about his abusive tendencies, and then helped the father get a job in a wartime factory. She always took the time to get to the root of the problem. — Tim Hanley

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. — Tony Judt

A broken heart hurts as badly in wartime as in peace. — Kristin Hannah

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there. — David Bowie

It's about more than us, now, can't you see? I love you, of course I do, but some things ... some things just have to be done. — Natasha Farrant

Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. — Thomas Pynchon

The murder of a man is still murder, even in wartime. — Manfred Von Richthofen

there are still enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD - and maybe deserves its own diagnostic term - but both result from military service abroad, so it's understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to. A — Sebastian Junger

In wartime, everyone loves a soldier, and a wounded hero even more so. — Jack Higgins

Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. — Harry Elmer Barnes

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout. — Sara Sheridan

Surely no rational or realistic person will discount the possibility that [during wartime] the United States might suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. Those who retain the instinct for survival, not to speak of minimal concern for their fellow man, will seek ways to act before rather than after the event. — Noam Chomsky

Every war and conflict that the United States enters has its own ROE [rules of engagement]. Contrary to what most people think, the U.S. military does not have a complete license to kill, even in wartime. We are not a barbaric state, and we do not enter any war with the intention of unilaterally killing anything in our path. We go out of our way to spare civilian lives, to keep those who are not in the war out of it
sometimes even at the expense of risking our own soldiers' safety. We do this by creating strict rules to which our soldies adhere. These rules govern when they can fire, when they cannot; what type of force they can use, what type they cannot; what they can do in particular situations, and what they cannot. The reason for this is that battles can become very confusing very quickly, and a common soldier needs simple rules to guide him, to know when he is or is not allowed to kill
and who is and is not the enemy. — Michael DeLong

Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of out foreign exchange, was being spent on the war ... I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave a lecture with the title "Newton, the Man." ... Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions. — Freeman Dyson

You needn't worry about me. I know enough to do what every man ought to do in wartime when he's watched and threatened by bullies. I conceal my feelings; lie whenever necessary; pretend to admire the rascals who've ruined our city and our country; cheer dolts, bullies and knaves and damn all wise temperate men! — Kenneth Roberts

Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches. — Simran Keshwani

The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage. — William T. Vollmann

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France. — Max Boot

You know how long's the universe. It's seven million freeways side by side. You know how high. So high the moon just falls. But little punks, you still know the hardcore of the universe. It's cause you're hardcore too. You're made of pure universe, under your bones. And nothing ever starts shit by meaning to. We meant to break down the amerikan dream throwing bottles. All we broke was bottles. What worked was one stolen handful of flax seed. All ages shows in the highschool parkade, and the keys to the bandroom door. Their dream was a joke anyway. What worked was a nother joke. — Noah Wareness

He thought America's character would be defined by how it treated its vanquished enemies, and he wanted to graduate from bitter wartime grievances to the forgiving posture of peace. — Ron Chernow

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring. — Sara Sheridan

Could it be that many of our problems with prayer and much of our weakness in prayer come from the fact that we are not all on active duty, and yet we still try to use the transmitter? We have taken a wartime walkie-talkie and tried to turn it into a civilian intercom to call the servants for another cushion in the den. — John Piper

The injustice is that women continue to be the main target of violence both during wartime and peacetime and yet there is still a lack of a public outrage. — Zainab Salbi

Why don't people talk about Japan's wartime emperor Hirohito in the same breath as people do about Germany's Hitler? After all, both had an almost similar role in instigating World War II. In the West, whether it is good or bad, people take full responsibility for their actions, and they have total freedom to express their true feelings. On the contrary, here in the East, it is always the small people who take the blame and are made scapegoats. That is, for you and me, the difference between the West and the East, my friend."

My 7th book is coming....! — Tim I. Gurung

At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control, many began to offer health care as a fringe benefit to attract workers. As a new benefit, it took some years for the Internal Revenue Service to get around to requiring the cost of the medical care to be included in the reported taxable income of the employees. By the time it did, workers had come to regard nontaxable medical care provided by the employer as a right - or should I say entitlement? They raised such a big political fuss that Congress legislated nontaxable status for employer-provided medical care. — Milton Friedman

There was a silence, and I looked at Laura - really looked at her - and had the sudden impression that I was having dinner with a simulacrum, a knockoff. I felt like the man who buys the box of genuine wartime memorabilia at auction and brings it home to discover, under the first layer, piles and piles of shredded newspaper. — Paul Murray

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set ... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it ... could be dismantled overnight. — J.G. Ballard

Among the wartime survivors was a four-year-old Makassan girl with a large mole dangling like a pigeon egg under her left eye, who was looking for her lost parents. She was picked up by a brothel woman, but later ran away to live among street boys left homeless by the war.

They gave her the nickname Big Mole. — Ming Cher

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. — Chris Hedges

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life. — A.S. Byatt

We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.) — Tom McDonough

Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the opposite. While he did retrieve the horrible images, he rediscovered a lost innocence as well. The beauty of the jungle, the glistening white sands of the Vietnamese beaches, and the intense greens of the rice paddies at dawn all filtered back to him. Not only did he remember his trauma, he remembered himself before his trauma. — Mark Epstein

The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires. — Antonin Scalia

The worst of these comments came in mid-April from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who said in a press conference, "This war is lost" and "The surge is not accomplishing anything." I was furious and shared privately with some of my staff a quote from Abraham Lincoln I had written down long before: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — Robert M. Gates

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious. — Donna Tartt

Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home. — Gloria Steinem

Too many?pass judgement on wartime decisions in the luxury of a peacetime environment. — Harry S. Truman

When, in 2012, Newt Gingrich was asked about how his religious beliefs would affect his conduct should he become president, the Republican nominee hopeful answered, "One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity" in the United States. For a potential president to state that he sees himself as a wartime candidate who will defend his party against other citizens is astonishing. There is not even a pretense here of "united states". — Candida R. Moss

No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime. — Guy Sajer

prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their able-bodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice. — Ralph Ellison

Recalled Sir Edward Spears, the wartime liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle. We had 15,000 French sailors at Liverpool. I went to speak to them. I tried to persuade them to continue the fighting. Impossible ... — Charles Kaiser