World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.
A. B. Yehoshua
Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
A. J. P. Taylorburak
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
A. S. Byatt
I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.
Abbey Lincoln
Just as we responded following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and just as an earlier generation rallied in a united front to fight World War II, members of Congress must respond to the coronavirus pandemic without regard to our party affiliation.
Abigail Spanberger
The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.
Adam Curtis
The latest rule is: you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war. Other rules say you cannot have collective ideas that involve the surrender of the individual to the group - otherwise, you get totalitarianism or, even worse, religion.
As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
Adam Hochschild
The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.
Adam Michnik
In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity.
Adam Schiff
Nine g's is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn't stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.
Adolf Galland
After World War II, scientific research in the U.S. was well supported. In the 1960s, when I came to America, the sky was the limit, and this conducive atmosphere enabled many of us to pursue esoteric research that resulted in America winning the lion's share of Nobel Prizes.
Ahmed Zewail
Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war.
My two grandfathers fought in World War II.
Ainsley Earhardt
Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
Al Gore
My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.
Al Pacino
I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
Alan Furst
In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis' communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay?
Alan K. Simpson
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don't have large minority groups.
Human beings of today are more fragile, whereas people born in wartime, during the Second World War, eventually became the great players like Pele. They were fantastic players.
I think that perhaps the classic propagandists of the - in the Second World War was Winston Churchill. He was extremely skilled and adept at it.
The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.
How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR committed a most visionary act: He appointed a Harvard historian to write the official account of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Samuel Eliot Morison was given the rank of lieutenant commander, with the right to interview anyone of whatever status.
Some of our best and unexpected discoveries have been born out of crises - from the Second World War, for example, came Alan Turing's decoding machine, widely considered as the precursor to modern day computers and artificial intelligence.
We learned the value of research in World War II.
Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.
Growing up in northern Kentucky, honesty, integrity and character were revered traits, and - with my family - I looked to the greatest generation of Americans who saved the world during World War II.
Both of my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, and my great-grandfather died at the Somme in the First World War. I never truly believed that the War just finished and everyone was happy-clappy, brought out the bunting, and felt everything was okay again. That's definitely not my impression of the fall-out of war.
I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan.
Winston Churchill inspired my leadership philosophy. I've read a huge number of his writings, especially his diaries from the Second World War. His thoughts on leadership and duty have helped me as England captain.
I can completely take a second World War gun apart and put it back together again thanks to 'Band Of Brothers.' That's always useful. I've got lots and lots of random skills I'll probably never need again.
Distorting the history of World War II, denying the crimes of genocide and the Holocaust as well as an instrumental use of Auschwitz to attain any given goal is tantamount to desecration of the memory of the victims whose ashes are scattered here.
There are Jews who were born in Poland before World War II and survived the Holocaust, who think Poland and the Poles deserve an apology.
The members of my people who took part in the pogrom in Kielce after the end of World War II expelled themselves from the Polish people. That is my deep personal conviction.
When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.
The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
'World War Z' is basically a big-budget B-movie.
Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.
Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.
Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.
I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.
