Post-war Quotes

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

As a result of the World War and of a peace whose imperfections and risks are no longer denied by anyone, are we not even further away from the great aspirations and hopes for peace and fraternity than we were one or two decades ago?

In the post war period I began again to have my doubts about Russian policy.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

… the first armed aggression which the world has seen since the end of the war.

Strange isn’t it? We are all democrats now.

Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.

The first time I went to Iraq was October 2002, when Saddam was still in power, and then, subsequently, in January of 2003, about three-and-a-half months before the U.S. invasion. So, I got to see the before and after of Iraq, basically, before and after the war.

The United States, working closely with the United Kingdom and others, established the liberal world order in the wake of World War II. The goal was to ensure that the conditions that had led to two world wars in 30 years would never again arise.

The United States, per capita, at a certain period in its history, had the most junkies of any country ever in the world - right after the Civil War. The most brutal war, the greatest amount of casualties that America's ever had.

Nineteen forty-five marked the nadir of Western Civilization.

When our young officers come back from the army, on a forty days' furlough, they find apathy and opposition in the cities.

Western Europe has been redefining the nation state since 1945 when it formed the European Union following World War II.

When my father went back into the military in 1947 and was gone for 3-1/2 years, my mother was 24 years old with four kids in a town she didn't know that well with no military services available, no family services available through the military, and that was the norm.

Our military knows how to invade and conquer a country, but we do not know how to run one.

Sure we won the war, but the peace we’re losing badly.

The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

The '50s was a pretty wonderful time for people, it was hopeful.

When I was a young boy, during the aftermath of World War II, Germany was broken and in ruins. Many people were hungry, sick, and dying. I remember well the humanitarian shipments of food and clothing that came from the Church in Salt Lake City.

With Germany conquered, the Kremlin checkmated, Japan converted, it became easier - safer - to peek around looking for someone to fear... and maybe do something about. Ideally, somebody far away, from a country about which almost nothing was known.

We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]