One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about... daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o...r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920's and 1930's when those who should have known better per...suaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which f...ather knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the Second World War approximately the same European allies fought approximately the same adversaries as in the first. Though t...he tide of the battle swung more violently to and fro, the battle ended in much the same way--with the defeat of Germany. The link between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought specifically in the second war to reverse the verdict of the first and to destroy the settlement which followed it. Her opponents fought, though less consciously, to defend that settlement; and this they achieved--to their own surprise. There was much utopian projecting while the second war was on; but at the end virtually every frontier of Europe and the Near East was restored unchanged, with the exception--admittedly a large exception--of Poland and the Baltic. Leaving out this area of north-eastern Europe, the only serious change on the map between the English Channel and the Indian Ocean was the transference of Istria from Italy to Yugoslavia. The first war destroyed old Empires and brought new states into existence. The second war created no new states and destroyed only Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of... the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far- brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For this world we live in None of us is sly enough.... Never do we notice All is lie and bluff. Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not Always spoken the truth in my books? And now You treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me! Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men. Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are the sons and daughters of the world they saved. [Now is our moment] to make common cause with other countries to ensure a w...orld of peace and prosperity for yet another generation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »