Quotes & Sayings About Ww2

We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all ... that life at any price has no value whatever; that life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys that make it worth living and also worth giving ... and that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear. — Eve Curie

Before America entered the war [WW2] I knew we could not win it, but after she entered I knew we could not lose — Winston Churchill

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration. — Neal Stephenson

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more. — Nancy Wake

She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that she'd been silencing the noise for the past twenty years. — Jennifer Ryan

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. — Sir Laurens Van Der Post

Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice. — Jennifer Ryan

And I realized that this is what it's like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot forward, when the world around you seems to have collapsed in its entirety, become a place of isolation, a sepia photograph of its former illusion. — Jennifer Ryan

I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have. — Jennifer Ryan

One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care. — John Edward Williams

Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much. — Denis Avey

At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I'd ever had. — Alfred Nestor

If we don't think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live? — Jennifer Ryan

That pistol I gave you is a piece of crap. You can't hit anything with it, not at that distance."
Staring at her with tears in his blinking eyes, he says, "I did."
Conversation between Alis K and Willy
The Informer — Steen Langstrup

Gentlemen, this is a story that you shall tell your grandchildren, and mightily bored they'll be. — Lt General Brian Horrocks

Her nerves licked her palms. — Markus Zusak

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement. — Malcolm Lowry

You know what, BB? We've got dark spots on our souls. We have to live with that. War is not about doing what's right. War's about surviving."

Verner aka 'Jens'
in the novel 'The Informer' by Steen Langstrup — Steen Langstrup

As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live. — Alfred Nestor

The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians. — George Monbiot

As I remember, the worst result of a World War II block was a flood of Argentine Gin. Sensitive martini-boys and Gibson-girls still shudder ... — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred. — Elie Wiesel

The Wilhelm Gustloff was pregnant with lost souls conceived of war. They would crowd into her belly and she would give birth to their freedom. — Ruta Sepetys

A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. — James Morcan

The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls. — Denis Avey

Always there have been six ravens at the Tower. If the ravens fly away, the kingdom will fall. — John Owen Theobald

After months of rumors, inference, and horrible miscalculations, the impossible had happened. The U.S. Pacific fleet lay twisted anad burning at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Had he been wrong about Japan not taking an offensive right now? God, he had thousands of men and women to think of, and he feared in his heart that it might not turn out the way he had seen it. He felt doomed, almost paralyzed by his gross miscalculation. He determined, however, that he would not let the word out about Pearl Harbor until he could meet with his American strategists and Philippine President Manuel Quezon. — Joyce Shaughnessy

One woman, called Eva, used to visit my mother and sometimes we would call in next door to visit her. Sometimes Frau Eva gave me cakes and fruit drinks. I remember she was very kind. It was not until many years later that I understood just who she was. To me, at the time, she was just a very nice woman who lived next door sometimes, although she did tend to go away, and was often not seen for several months. — Alfred Nestor

Do I look like the mastermind of this? I just do what I'm told. They tel me to arrest the foreign-born Jews in Paris, so I do it. They want the crowd separated - single men to Drancy, families to the Vet d'hie Viola! It's done. Point rifles at them and be prepared to shoot. The government wants all of France's foreign Jews sent east to work camps, and we're starting here.'
All of France? Isabelle felt the air rush out of her lungs. Operation Spring Wind. 'You mean this isn't just happening in Paris?'
'No. This is just the start. — Kristin Hannah

I often noticed that the surrounding mountains inspired Hitler. He once joked that here he stood 'above the world' in an environment comparable to Olympius, legendary mount of the gods, but that alone can never have been the motivation for himto put down his private roots on Obersalzberg. — Heinz Linge

The dangers of the sea should always take precedence
over the violence of the enemy'
Rear-Admiral Ben Bryant CB, DSO and two bars, DSC — Ben Bryant

Sergeant Missouri crouched close to the ground, pulling up his collar against the bitter, gusting winds. Show me, he thought tiredly, I'm from Missouri. — Maureen Daly

To die,
so young to die.
No, no, not I,
I love the warm sunny skies,
light, song, shining eyes,
I want no war, no battle cry,
No, no, not I. — Hannah Senesh

It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto - it was illusion. — Elie Wiesel

A sense of responsibility - or was it guilt? - hung over me, that I was in some way at fault because of cowering to all these pompous men all these years, when I should have had the bravery to reclaim my own mind. That if we women had done this years ago, before the last war, before this one, we'd be in a very different world. — Jennifer Ryan

Danny and I were sposed to go to his mother's house for Thanksgiving. Now what? What do I tell his mother?
Well, not this. Mothers hate it when you tell them their sons are queer. — Vanda

When this war is over we should raise a memorial in every Australian capital to the New Guinea natives so that we may never forget how much of the white man's burden was carried by the natives in this roadless jungle warfare ... so that we may remember how many Australians owe their lives to the natives who bore the wounded in their stretchers across the tortuous trail to safety. — Chester Wilmot

You kill yourself when you hate. It's the worst disease in the world. — William Schiff

If the ravens leave the Tower, Britain will fall. — John Owen Theobald

Looking up, Missouri saw a formation of low-flying P-47's on the horizon, heading up the coast from Naples...Sergeant Missouri laughed aloud. "They're sending us the Air Force, Chico, and we made it with a donkey," he said. — Maureen Daly

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

The man who had asked my name in Obersalzberg in the summer of 1934 had been a dominant personality excluding a spellbinding charisma to which few were not prey. The embodied sovereign power, total power. The man whom I burnt and interred under a hail of Red Army shells near the Reich Chancellery was a trembling old man, a spent force, feeble, a failure. Like the Reich which he had aimed to bring into an era of unparalleled brilliance and opulence and had become a heap of rubble, he was the disfigured embodiment of his earlier self. — Heinz Linge

I would have fought in WW2, so I wasn't a pacifist in the broader sense. I prefer to be a pacifist, but I think there are exceptions and times to defend yourself or your country, but that war wasn't one of them. — Joe R. Lansdale

[ ... ] That is why we are here today, because we have had the strength within us to survive, a flame inside of us that have not gone out. We are still human, not dust, like millions of others, and we will continue to be, no matter what adversity we face. — Liv-Christine Hoem

As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water. — Eric Newby

That evening we sat in the courtyard of the hotel once more, watching the sun sink below the western isles. I told Alexi what had happened that day. I fancied I could glimpse the grey stone wall of Lismore House on its island hilltop, the red light of the setting sun glinting from the windows, and from there the wasted frame of Jonathan Blake gazing out across the sea, on nothing, his boy waiting for him to die. But it was my fantasy, simply the image on my mind, like the image burned on to your eyes when you have stared too long at the sun, the passing footprint of a creature long gone. — P.B. North

Even if this spring the dappled leaves should shelter our minds from the moon's pale echo we would still remember how once they were sheltered by our skulls only from the day's sun and the night's stars and never from what we feared and what we remembered — Dan Davin

A searchlight catches the plane for an instant. The cockpit is awash with searing bluish brightness. As if a revelation is about to take place. As if an angel is about to appear. He can't see the instrument panel. The finger of light has the aircraft in its grip. Holding her suspended above the city. As if she is perched on a tightrope. Visible to the whole of Berlin down below. The glare bites into his eyes, sucks strength from his legs. He kicks the rudders to the right. The starboard wing tilts down. He pulls the wheel back. Below, a shifting tableau of coloured globes slide over the tilting smoking surface of the earth. Some roads and buildings made visible by fires and incendiaries. — Glenn Haybittle

All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay - Winston Churchill — Stuart Finlay

Lastly, 'Hang tough!' Never, ever give up regardless of the adversity. If you are a leader, a fellow who other fellows look to, you have to keep going. — Dick Winters

They say 'stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage'. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn't capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free. — Denis Avey

The crematorium could not burn the bodies fast enough - so after we dug long trenches, we pulled and dragged the bodies to the edges and threw them in. You'll not believe it, but the SS forced the prisoners' band to play music as we lugged the corpses - and for that, I hope they burn in hell with polkas blaring. — Mary Ann Shaffer

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward. — Michael Hoffman

They died. Along with three other men who had joined our group. We were betrayed. The porter had told his girlfriend about the operation. They'd only just met each other. Jens shot her a week later."

Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer — Steen Langstrup

With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime. — Alfred Nestor

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war. — David Benioff

Who was Hitler" demanded little Tracy
"He was this bloke in World War Two" explained Ben. — Jackie French

I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical. — Alfred Nestor

The wounded are instruments, singing pain. — Brendan Phibbs

The German officers said any soldier caught stealing food from our gardens would be shot. One poor soldier was caught stealing a potato. He was chased by his own people and climbed up a tree to hide. But they found him and shot him down out of the tree. Still, that did not stop them from stealing food. I am not pointing a finger at those practices, because some of us were doing the same. I figure hunger makes you desperate when you wake to it every morning. — Mary Ann Shaffer

Then help us."
"I don't want to make trouble, Madame."
"Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?"
"Doing nothing is doing nothing."
"Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."
...
"It's not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it's a system. How do you fight a system?"
"You try. — Anthony Doerr

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders are worse. — Michael Moore

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

Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs.. — Erik Larson

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

Your guardian angel must have been working over time,' Penny laughed shakily.

Rose laughed as she put her arms around her sister and hugged her. 'More like the Devil taking care of his own. — Margaret Dickinson

Jutta whispers, A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn't let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren't we half-breeds too? Aren't we half our mother, half our father? — Anthony Doerr

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

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. — Dick Winters

I don't mean this to sound hyperbolic but there are increasingly, albeit really minor, similarities between now and how Germany was lulled into what happened pre-WW2. — David Cross

It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something - anything - else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there's no subtracting it. — Mary Ann Shaffer

The castle of Enysfarne was a dark and towering force that hovered over what was left of my innocence. It contained my destiny, of that I had no doubt whatsoever; a fate that threatened to wipe the blush off my face and turn me into the man my father always wanted me to be ... Veronica Somerset, Dragonfly. — Charles A. Cornell

As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us. — Alfred Nestor

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams — Dan Davin

I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others. — David Benioff

My bookshelves were groaning with WW2 books, Hitler's baleful eyes staring out at me from covers and spines for any new visitor (or passing burglar) to wonder if I might be a fan or at least mildly obsessed. — Al Murray

I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all. — Alfred Nestor

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee. — Alfred Nestor

We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy. — Irene Nemirovsky

Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it. — Jennifer Ryan

The Nazis understand everything except humour. — Mary Berg

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people — Heinrich Heine

They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing some thirty men, women, and children - one among them was my cousin's boy. He had sheltered underneath his lorry when he first saw the planes dropping bombs, and it exploded and caught fire. They killed men in their lifeboats at sea. They strafed the Red Cross ambulances carrying our wounded. When no one shot back at them, they saw the British had left us undefended. They just flew in peaceably two days later and occupied us for five years. — Mary Ann Shaffer

The Doctor: Amazing.
Nancy: What is?
The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me. — Steven Moffat

Thousands of those men and boys died here, and I have recently learned that their inhuman treatment was the intended policy of Himmler. He called his plan Death by Exhaustion, and he implemented it. Work them hard, don't waste valuable foodstuffs on them, and let them die. They could, and would, always be replaced by new slave workers from Europe's Occupied countries. — Mary Ann Shaffer

There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother ... — Vasily Grossman

I had my first cigarette when I was five," he says, making rings of smoke. "With my mother. — Steen Langstrup