Ww2 Quotes

“The Doctor: Amazing.
Nancy: What is?
The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me.”
― Steven Moffat

“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine

“War was funny like that: one minute you could try and block it and have the most wonderful thoughts, the next you were back in the nightmare.”
― Mark A. Cooper, The Edelweiss Express

“A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto - it was illusion.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“They say 'stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage'. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn't capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.”
― Randall Wallace, Pearl Harbor

“After months of rumors, inference, and horrible miscalculations, the impossible had happened. The U.S. Pacific fleet lay twisted anad burning at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Had he been wrong about Japan not taking an offensive right now? God, he had thousands of men and women to think of, and he feared in his heart that it might not turn out the way he had seen it. He felt doomed, almost paralyzed by his gross miscalculation. He determined, however, that he would not let the word out about Pearl Harbor until he could meet with his American strategists and Philippine President Manuel Quezon.”
― Joyce Shaughnessy, Blessed Are the Merciful

“I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH).

From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits?

We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea?

What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?”
― Timothy James Dean, Teeth

“Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much.”
― Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

“All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay - Winston Churchill”
― Stuart Finlay, What Churchill Would Do: Practical Business Advice Based on Winston's WW2 Wisdom

“That’s war. It won’t let anyone get away unscathed. I’m sorry about Grete.”

Verner aka ‘Jens’
in the novel 'the Informer' by Steen Langstrup”
― Steen Langstrup, The Informer

“Dal Ka-Be la musica non si sente bene: arriva assiduo e monotono il martellare della grancassa e dei piatti, ma su questa trama le frasi musicali si disegnano solo a intervalli, col capriccio del vento. Noi ci guardiamo l'un l'altro nei nostri letti, perchè tutti sentiamo che questa è musica infernale.
I motivi sono pochi, una dozzina, ogni giorno gli stessi, mattina e sera: marce e canzoni popolari care a ogni tedesco. Esse giacciono incise nelle nostre menti, saranno l'ultima cosa del Lager che dimenticheremo: sono la voce del Lager, l'espressione sensibile della sua follia geometrica, della risoluzione altrui di annullarci prima come uomoni per ucciderci poi lentamente.
Quando questa musica suona, noi sappiamo che i compagni, fuori nella nebbia, partono in marcia come automi; le loro anime sono morte e la musica li sospinge, come il vento le foglie secche, e si sostituisce alla loro volontà. Non c'è più volontà, ogni pulsazione diventa un passo, una contrazione rilflessa dei muscoli sfatti. [...] Ma dove andiamo non sappiamo. Potremo forse sopravvivere alle malattie e sfuggire alle scelte, forse anche resistere al lavoro e alla fame che ci consumano: e dopo? Qui, lontani momentaneamente dalle bestiemme e dai colpi, possiamo rientrare in noi stessi e meditare, e allora diventa chiaro che non ritorneremo. Noi abbiamo viaggiato fin qui nei vagoni piombati; noi abbiamo visto partire verso il niente le nostre donne e i nostri bambini; noi fatti schiavi abbiamo marciato centro volte avanti e indietro alla fatica muta, spenti nell'anima prima che dalla morte anonima. Noi non ritorneremo. Nessuno deve uscire di qui, che potrebbe portare al mondo, insieme col segno impresso nella carne, la mala novella di quanto ad Auschwitz, è bastato animo all'uomo di fare all'uomo.”
― Primo Levi

“Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.”
― Elie Wiesel

“In the vast expanse of the Pacific, island hopping emerged as a stroke of strategic brilliance, enabling the Allied forces to bypass heavily fortified Japanese strongholds while securing key strategic points. This nimble and audacious approach not only conserved precious resources but also provided crucial bases for launching further offensives. Island hopping reshaped the trajectory of the Pacific War, illustrating the power of adaptability and innovation in the face of formidable adversaries.”
― Ian W. Toll

“It was 1941. I was 18, and Peter, 21. We were young and old at the same time.”
― Jessica Glasner, Flight of the Seahawks

“They know that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people; we have as many heads as we have people.”
― John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down

“When the war broke he laughed and cried, "Now what did they have to do that for?" In his letters to John he was eloquent in his bitterness. He was sure that both he and John were going to die in this war. He said he preferred to die at sea. The sea was clean.”
― Bienvenido N. Santos, You lovely people

“For the time being, Europe’s epic of mass killing is over theorized and misunderstood.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Z europejskiej perspektywy wszystko, co się tam wydarzyło, działo się zbyt daleko, by mogło zostać nazwane wojną światową. Świat leży przecież w Europie.”
― Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing

“I was thinking, how did 'a sleepy country of poets and dreamers,' and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such a wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to have their souls raped.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“The previous year, in August 1941, the Butt Report had been published, an independent investigation into the accuracy of Bomber Command’s bombing effort. The killer statistic was the claim that only one in three bombers had been managing to drop their bombs within 5 miles of their target.”
― James Holland, Big Week: The Biggest Air Battle of World War II

“Whether my feelings were right or not, every day I felt relieved he was wounded. I was relieved he limped because he slept in my arms at night. I was relieved he had nothing more important to do than study or fish because I saw him every morning when I woke up. I couldn't tell him. I could never tell him, because the fact that he was not out there with all the other boys risking their lives for our country, for the world, was killing him. Every day it was killing him. But he was brave.”
― Jessica Glasner, Song of the Storm Petrel

“If he had seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust...”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Blythes Are Quoted

“People who go to Italy to look at ruins wont have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“On Churchill - "This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning. If he had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today.”
― Joseph Goebbels

“In the years that followed, William would become obsessed with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren't alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn't given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances of the Japanese learning about the MAGIC secret.

It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia,”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies