Quotes About War

By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan "America First.

history has seen three major democratic moments: after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989.

Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that "understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in "reprisals" (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles).

Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler "has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.

When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that "understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.

More than any of the other new states that came into being at war's end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland's very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, Great Britain was alone. The British had won no meaningful battles and had no important allies.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both

But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: "Mother says that we should eat her if she dies." This was forethought and love.83

After Hitler's rise in 1933, he pursued domestic policy for more than six years before he began his first war.

Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.

Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. —

War is not heroic. War is not exhilarating. War is full of despair. It is dark. It is dreadful. It is a thing of sorrow and gloom. That is why people fear war. That is why people choose to avoid it. ~Izuru Kira

There are laws for peace as well as war.

Il primo passo di ogni guerra è la disumanizzazione del nemico. Il nemico non è un uomo come te, quindi non ha gli stessi diritti.

Moi, je voulais comprendre la guerre. Bien sûr, je voulais aussi la voir car je voulais la décrire, mais je me suis rendue compte que ceux qui me tiraient dessus depuis une rangée de palmiers, moi qui m'étais jeté la tête la première dans un fossé pour m'abriter, ces hommes étaient aussitôt devenus mes "ennemies". Mais étaient-ils mes "ennemis" ? Non. Si j'avais continué comme ça tout au long de la guerre, je ne l'aurais jamais comprise. (p. 120)

primo passo di ogni guerra è la disumanizzazione del nemico. Il nemico non è un uomo come te, quindi non ha gli stessi diritti.

Si tout le monde ne se battait que par conviction il n'y aurait pas de guerre (Guerre et Paix, livre premier, 1ère partie, ch. VI)

To do what we are doing in this budget to our children, cutting their health care funds, decreasing opportunity, simply so we can pay for tax cuts and a war in Iraq is beyond belief, and we need to reverse it.

Were we not standing atop the birthplace of a certain kind of religious nationalism? Zion lay all around us. See where the Prophet left this earth, where Christ rose from the dead, where the Messiah would, finally, appear. Which of us, in this war, was not Judas to someone?

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country.