After Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, the war tide slowly turned against the Axis.
Alexander Dubcek
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.
Alistair Horne
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.
Anne Applebaum
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
Barney Ross
I hope no one will think of... sending me to Pearl Harbor.
Charles A. Lockwood
By all means, let someone else have Pearl Harbor.
Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.
Charles McCarry
My father volunteered in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and became an officer in the U.S. Navy. As I was growing up, he taught me the responsibility of command: A leader is ultimately responsible for every aspect of the welfare of people under his or her care. That was a deeply felt obligation in his generation.
Chesley Sullenberger
I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.
Dan Rather
We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
David E. Sanger
Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America - historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
David Hoffman
Pearl Harbor was the defining event in my life. It shaped who I am, and all of my hang-ups and my drives, I think, stem from that.
David Suzuki
The parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are striking. In each instance there were warning signs before the attack, and in each instance our government failed to connect the dots.
Diane Watson
History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.
Frank Gaffney
Before the war, my parents were very proud people. They'd always talk about Japan and also about the samurai and things like that. Right after Pearl Harbor, they were just real quiet. They kept to themselves; they were afraid to talk about what could happen. I assume they knew that nothing good would come out of it.
Fred Korematsu
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.
George Takei
It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is.
I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.
Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
George Will
When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high.
Hideki Tojo
I sincerely desire to be appointed Commander in Chief of the air fleet to attack Pearl Harbor so that I may personally command that attack force.
I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.
After the Battle of Midway there was a week in a rest camp at Pearl Harbor.
On December 5, 1941, Chicago led a task force built around the carrier Lexington to Midway Island, at the western end of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay doing a movie about the single most devastating, most holy day in United States military history? Why, that's like the Three Stooges doing a Holocaust movie. Or Barney doing 'Hamlet'.
Our military thought that they couldn't get to Pearl Harbor, that it was too long a journey from Japan to get there, and they proved us wrong.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 completely crippled our Pacific Fleet.
Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.
As costly as it was in the lives of our men and women in uniform, in military assets, and in esteem and pride, Pearl Harbor was a watershed moment for America.
Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a European conflict. Marcus Garvey's prophecy about the European scramble to maintain dominance over the whole world was now a reality.
My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.
Can any of us even imagine, after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt suggesting we negotiate a resolution or that we could simply prosecute those involved? Of course it is unimaginable. We are right to be in the Middle East, and we are right to treat this as the war it is.
Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.
A lot of directors don't want the pressure of a movie the size of Pearl Harbor. But I love it. I thrive on it.
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.
For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.
The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was 'Remember Pearl Harbor, never again.' We need to keep that to mind.
I was naturalized right before Pearl Harbor. Nine days later, I would have been classified as an enemy alien. I might have been sent to a camp.
The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.
Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America's enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.
My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.
The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.
I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.
We're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.
But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.
Millions of people gave their lives fighting fascism and imperialism, but Pearl Harbor was the event that forever changed the course of human history.
