Quotes About Humanity

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.

It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

In the aftermath of the second world war, nations came together to say 'never again.' They established the United Nations and agreed a simple set of universal standards of decency for mankind to cling to: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

We can have a World War, I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have a World Party.

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.

Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920's and 1930's when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother.

All one has to do is look at old footage of the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and think of the people beneath those bombs. It's horrific.

If I'd been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

We tend to think of World War II and all the atrocities that happened, and people say, 'Never again.' But these things are still happening. The Amnesty International files are big.

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.

World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.

Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some extent.

I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that.

By my count, of the more than 600 English-language World War II movies made since 1940, only four have even acknowledged the humanity of the soldiers of Nippon. There may be a few I've missed, but not many.

The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.

Gosh, I think faith is a wonderful thing. And I even think religion's a wonderful thing. I know a lot of people want to say, 'Religion's the only reason that man has had any trouble at all,' but you know what? World War I and World War II were not fought because of religious reasons.

World War II was the last 'pure' war. It was purely heroic. There was someone who tried to conquer the world, who tried to exterminate people.

My grandmother, Dorothy Walker Bush, worked long, hard hours for the Red Cross during World War II because it was the right thing to do for her community. The example of his parents established my father's belief that every human has the capacity to serve their fellow man.