Quotes About World Wars

That tells us that the most damaging kinds of lethal violence (at least from 1820 to 1952) were murders and world wars; all the other kinds of quarrels killed far fewer people.

In a survey of historical memory, I asked a hundred Internet users to write down as many wars as they could remember in five minutes. The responses were heavily weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States, and wars close to the present. Though the earlier centuries, as we shall see, had far more wars, people remembered more wars from the recent centuries.

This is a high-strung, neurotic, impatient age. We hurry when there is no reason to hurry, just to be hurrying. This fast-paced age has produced more problems and less morality than previous generations, and it has given us jangled nerves. Impatience as produced a crop of broken homes, ulcers, and has set the stage for more world wars.

Dad was the generation that fought in both world wars, and people married rather later when they had been in the trenches. My mum was an actress and he saw her in a show in London and they married. She stopped acting when she had babies, which is a shame.

The monumental tragedies of the 20th century -- a world-wide Great Depression, two devastating World Wars, the Holocaust, famines killing millions in the Soviet Union and tens of millions in China -- should leave us with a sobering sense of the threats to any society. But this generation's ignorance of history leaves them free to be frivolous -- until the next catastrophe strikes, and catches them completely by surprise.

How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

In both world wars, Britain understood that our national sovereignty could only endure if we cooperated with other nations. That our fate is inexorably bound with that of our neighbours.

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen. The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.

What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)

two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.

The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen...We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

The two world wars boosted American power and devastated potential rivals to an extent that could not have lasted more than a few decades.

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.

If the world is going to be regarded as a continual hunting, fishing and fighting expedition," said Dorothy, "— if it is to be regarded in terms of the primitive male activities — then it will go on as it has gone on, with booms, depressions, and wars... It's going to be Caesars and World Wars throughout a long future

The tens of millions of dead in the two World Wars brought about tens of trillions of profitable investments in the huge reconstructions of destroyed homes and industries and ongoing rearmament: a million dollars or more per dead body. —DARKO SUVIN1

To claim that the world has known only two world wars is to ignore the history of past generations and civilizations.

For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.