World War Two Quotes

1. "We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo..."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."
Author: Aldous Huxley

3. "The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness... The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious mind will hush if you give it an egg."
Author: Annie Dillard

4. "To a young man, even a student of the most fabulous and powerful school on the Civilized Worlds, the times during which he comes to maturity always seem normal no matter how extraordinary, how turbulent with change they really are. Imminent change and danger act as drugs upon the human brain, or rather, as rich foods that nourish the urge toward more life. And how easily one becomes used to such nourishment. Those who survive the signal events of history – the wars, plagues, alien contacts, vastenings, speciations and religious awakenings – develop a taste for ferment and evolution next to which all the moments of 'normal' existence will seem dull, flat, meaningless. (Indeed, viewed from a godly coign of vantage across more than two million years, nothing about humankind's astonishing journey from the grassy veldts of Afarique to the galaxy's cold, numinous stars can be seen as normal.)"
Author: David Zindell

5. "I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot."
Author: Douglas Feith

6. "On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed."
Author: Eliot Engel

7. "I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough."
Author: Eugene Cernan

8. "But the whole modern world, or at any rate the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds...Why on earth do the newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political assassination, call it a "dastardly outrage" or a cowardly outrage? It is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It is perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going to the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of being torn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is not cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it is very infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that our modern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything, rather than appeal to right and wrong."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

9. "I can still catch the fragrance of many things which stir me with feelings of melancholy and send delicious shivers of delight through me - dark and sunlit streets, houses and towers, clock chimes and people's faces, rooms full of comfort and warm hospitality, rooms full of secret and profound, ghostly fears. It is a world that savours of warm corners, rabbits, servant girls, household remedies and dried fruit. It was the meeting-place of two worlds; day and night came thither from two opposite poles."
Author: Hermann Hesse

10. "After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war."
Author: Horst Koehler

11. "They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me."
Author: Jack Kerouac

12. "If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail."
Author: Jean Marie Le Pen

13. "The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words "going along". We simply go along with the values and practices of society."
Author: Jerry Bridges

14. "Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you."
Author: Jodi Picoult

15. "May 1, 2011Young jubulent Americans celebrating the killing of a murderer of women and children, and people ask;"Is it right to celebrate?"I watched these Americans in Times Square, D.C. and the world , a great generation, that died for freedom and that of the oppressed, and people ask; "Is it right to feel joy?""Yes, I sat proudly with tears in my eyes."I was watching footage of the end of World War Two.....Johnny Flora"
Author: Johnny Flora

16. "In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist."
Author: Juan Goytisolo

17. "Most white people in Midland City were insecurewhen they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their wordssimple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum.Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.This was because their English teachers would wince and cover theirears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed tospeak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: theywere told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language ifthey couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poemsand plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.The black people would not put up with this. They went on talkingEnglish every which way. They refused to read books they couldn'tunderstand—on the grounds they couldn't understand them. Theywould ask such impudent questions as, "Whuffo I want to read no Taleof Two Cities? Whuffo?"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

18. "He supposed that they were part of an amazing new phase of World War Two. It was all right with him. Everything was pretty much all right with Billy."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

19. "As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place."
Author: Michael Chabon

20. "Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

21. "HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude ... Also, they don't dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division."
Author: Nicole Krauss

22. "[Father Dmitry] "lived through collectivization, the crushing of the 80 percent of Russians that were peasants. He served as a soldier in World War Two, when millions of peasants died defending the government that had crushed them. He spent eight years in the gulag, the network of labour camps created to break the spirit of anyone who still resisted. He rose again to speak out for his parishioners in the 1960's and 1970's, striving to help young Russians create a freer and fairer society."
Author: Oliver Bullough

23. "What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German."
Author: Philip K. Dick

24. "Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank."
Author: Philip K. Dick

25. "Love We Must PartLove, we must part now: do not let it beCalamitous and bitter. In the pastThere has been too much moonlight and self-pity:Let us have done with it: for now at lastNever has sun more boldly paced the sky,Never were hearts more eager to be free,To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and INo longer hold them; we are husks, that seeThe grain going forward to a different use.There is regret. Always, there is regret.But it is better that our lives unloose,As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,Break from an estuary with their courses set,And waving part, and waving drop from sight."
Author: Philip Larkin

26. "Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins."
Author: Rob Thomas

27. "We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog."
Author: Ronald A. Knox

28. "The End of World War OneOut of the scraped surface of the landmen began to emerge, like puppiesfrom the slit of their dam. Up from the trenchesthey came out upon the pitted, raw earthwobbling as if new-born.They could not believe they would be allowed to live,the orders had come down: no more killing.They approached the enemy, holding out chocolateand cigarettes. They shook hands, exchangedsouvenirs--mess-kits, neckerchiefs.Some even embraced, while in Londontotal strangers copulatedin doorways and on the pavement, in the ecstasyof being reprieved. Nine months later,like men emerging from the trenches, first the head,then the body, there were lifted, newborn, from these mothers,the soldiers of World War Two."
Author: Sharon Olds

29. "Lovely morning, World War Two."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

30. "The Adoption When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn't his looks that got him a date"
Author: Walter Isaacson

31. "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."
Author: William Saroyan

World War Two Quotes Pictures