Post-War Trauma Quotes

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan.

As a Korean War Veteran, I know too well the troubling nature of war. This is why I will always support a diplomatic answer before military intervention.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

After the war [WW I], the soul of the people will be so maimed and so injured that it is horrible to think of.

The emotions suppressed during the long, tense period of global warfare were released by peace, and erupted into a tornado-like explosion of violent feelings, abusive criticism of the military, and aggressive pressures on Congress for fundamental reforms in the court-martial system.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

The worst legacy of World War II was the civilian as a target.

I played in bombed-out houses and grew up with the ever-present consequences of a lost war and the awareness that my own country had inflicted terrible pain on many nations during the horrific World War II.

This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.

France has accepted large numbers of blacks into its army. It has given them the same political rights as the whites. Thus it can happen that black officers command whites. Blacks and Moroccans fought against Germany in the World War. After the war, blacks raped German women and girls in the Rhineland. Germans — never forget that!

The victors in great wars have always been spiritually defeated by the conquered.

Landmines are among the most barbaric weapons of war, because they continue to kill and maim innocent people long after the war itself has ended. Also, fear of them keeps people off the land, and thus prevents them from growing food.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal.

6,000 people were killed, crippled, and wounded during the War of Independence. The economy was devastated - there was no milk, just milk powder. No eggs, but egg powder. Meat was only once a week.

What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it.

My father had been a Wehrmacht officer in the second world war and was a violent and damaged man.

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.

I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so.