Wartime Quotes - page 3
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
Robert Oppenheimer
During wartime, no belligerent nation will admit any limitation of its supreme sovereignty. Each nation is a law unto itself Treaties and international laws are sometimes observed in war, if their observance does not stand in the way of winning. But tragic experience indicates that the most sacred obligations are utterly disregarded when their observance means losing the war.
Kirby Page
[Churchill's wartime menus] show him slurping bottles of whisky, champagne [and] brandy with every sumptuous meal, while the underclass fought and starved for the privilege of poverty and unemployment. Thankfully, the Germans bombed Glasgow back to full employment. Even in the 1960s Earl Mountbatten was prosecuted for adding water to the milk on his farm so you can imagine how the landed gentry 'rationed' themselves during the war.
Ian Brady
For the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
Al Gore
'Feminist comedy,' practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.
Grace Slick
California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations - the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories - followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.
Christopher Isherwood
Posterity, until now, has been truly inequitable regarding Godbout. It is true, he was responsible [...] of renunciations, if you will, renunciations that this absolutely infernal pressure of wartime made probably inevitable. But it is quite unjust that people forgot that these few years of the Godbout government were also punctuated by three crucial decisions that almost constitute the act of birth of contemporary Quebec. In a few brief years, in only one government mandate, the creation of Hydro-Quebec, the establishment of obligatory instruction and [...] the women's vote.
Adélard Godbout
If we really came to a position in which we could no longer produce the grain which we must necessarily consume, then in what state would we be if in wartime we had no Russian grain imports and perhaps simultaneously were blockaded along our coasts – in other words, if we had no grain at all?
Otto von Bismarck
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time..
Milan Kundera
Wars fought exclusively on foreign soil do have marginally higher real output growth than peacetime periods, but real growth during all other wars is sharply below peacetime levels. Evidence for foreign and domestic wars is consistent with monetarist, fiscalist, and mixed theories of wartime booms.
Bryan Caplan
