Ww2 Quotes

“If we don't think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

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

“My part is not a heroic one, but I shall play my part.”
― Jean Anouilh, Antigone

“A sense of responsibility— or was it guilt?— hung over me, that I was in some way at fault because of cowering to all these pompous men all these years, when I should have had the bravery to reclaim my own mind. That if we women had done this years ago, before the last war, before this one, we’d be in a very different world.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.”
― Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines

“As I remember, the worst result of a World War II block was a flood of Argentine Gin. Sensitive martini-boys and Gibson-girls still shudder....”
― M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

“Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Lately the commandant speaks more and more intimately of the führer and the latest thing- prayers, petroleum, loyalty- that he requires. The führer requires trustworthiness, electricity, boot leather. Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on. Give up cream for the führer, sleep for the führer, aluminum for the führer. Give up Reinhard Wöhlmann's father and Karl Westerholzer's father and Martin Burkhard's father.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.”
― Sir Laurens van der Post

“You kill yourself when you hate. It's the worst disease in the world.”
― William Schiff, William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony

“When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches”
― James D. Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

“Hitler initially served in the List Regiment engaged in a violent four-day battle near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, with elite British professional soldiers of the initial elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler thereby served as a combat infantryman in one of the most intense engagements of the opening phase of World War I. The List Regiment was temporarily destroyed as an offensive force by suffering such severe casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) that it lost approximately 70 percent of its initial strength of around 3,600 men. A bullet tore off Hitler’s right sleeve in the first day of combat, and in the “batch” of men with which he originally advanced, every one fell dead or wounded, leaving him to survive as if through a miracle. On November 9, 1914, about a week after the ending of the great battle, Hitler was reassigned as a dispatch runner to regimental headquarters. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class.

On about November 14, 1914, the new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Philipp Engelhardt, accompanied by Hitler and another dispatch runner, moved forward into terrain of uncertain ownership. Engelhardt hoped to see for himself the regiment’s tactical situation. When Engelhardt came under aimed enemy smallarms fire, Hitler and the unnamed comrade placed their bodies between their commander and the enemy fire, determined to keep him alive. The two enlisted men, who were veterans of the earlier great four-day battle around Ypres, were doubtlessly affected by the death of the regiment’s first commander in that fight and were dedicated to keeping his replacement alive. Engelhardt was suitably impressed and proposed Hitler for the Iron Cross Second Class, which he was awarded on December 2. Hitler’s performance was exemplary, and he began to fit into the world around him and establish the image of a combat soldier tough enough to demand the respect of anyone in right wing, Freikorps-style politics after the war.

-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 88”
― Russel H.S. Stolfi

“Do I look like the mastermind of this? I just do what I'm told. They tel me to arrest the foreign-born Jews in Paris, so I do it. They want the crowd separated - single men to Drancy, families to the Vet d'hie Viola! It's done. Point rifles at them and be prepared to shoot. The government wants all of France's foreign Jews sent east to work camps, and we're starting here.'
All of France? Isabelle felt the air rush out of her lungs. Operation Spring Wind. 'You mean this isn't just happening in Paris?'
'No. This is just the start.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“Always there have been six ravens at the Tower. If the ravens fly away, the kingdom will fall.”
― John Owen Theobald, These Dark Wings

“I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.”
― Nancy Wake

“I didn't know then that the sweet life could be like honeysuckle smothering a barbed-wire fence.”
― Anne Lovett, Rubies from Burma

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

“We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“Aufgearbeitet wäre die Vergangenheit erst dann, wenn die Ursachen des Vergangenen beseitigt wären. Nur weil die Ursachen fortbestehen, ward sein Bann bis heute nicht gebrochen.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959 - 1969

“Who was Hitler" demanded little Tracy
"He was this bloke in World War Two" explained Ben.”
― Jackie French, Hitler's Daughter

“Sergeant Missouri crouched close to the ground, pulling up his collar against the bitter, gusting winds. Show me, he thought tiredly, I'm from Missouri.”
― Maureen Daly, Small War of Sergeant Donkey

“Looking up, Missouri saw a formation of low-flying P-47's on the horizon, heading up the coast from Naples...Sergeant Missouri laughed aloud. "They're sending us the Air Force, Chico, and we made it with a donkey," he said.”
― Maureen Daly, Small War of Sergeant Donkey

“Your guardian angel must have been working over time,' Penny laughed shakily.

Rose laughed as she put her arms around her sister and hugged her. 'More like the Devil taking care of his own.”
― Margaret Dickinson, The Clippie Girls

“She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that she'd been silencing the noise for the past twenty years.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“If the ravens leave the Tower, Britain will fall.”
― John Owen Theobald, These Dark Wings

“Perhaps the Allies will engage in some trickery. A diversionary landing, perhaps as you yourself have suggested, my Fuhrer. But the real strike will come here. At Calais.”
― Daniel Silva, The Unlikely Spy

“In spite of all the terrible things that happened to me, I did not allow Hitler to make me feel less than human. I had been raised well and I knew who I was. My strategy was not to allow myself to hate. I knew I could be consumed by such hate”
― Jack Mandelbaum