Top 280 World War II Quotes

Words matter. These are the best World War II Quotes from famous people such as Mehdi Hasan, Chuck Norris, Eric Liu, Sarah Gadon, Sander Levin, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs – 635,000 tons – and napalm – 32,557 tons – than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?
Mehdi Hasan
My father fought in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge.
Chuck Norris
My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.
Eric Liu
My grandmother was British and in the Women’s Auxiliary Royal Air Force in World War II.
Sarah Gadon
I was essentially trained by World War II vets who combined a progressive view of life with a deep distrust of anything authoritarian.
Sander Levin
I lost a great uncle in World War II who was with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Jake Tapper
There’s an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it’s called ‘Come and See.’ Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.
Craig Mazin
Once Europe’s colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization’s primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century – just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.
Harold E. Varmus
Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother’s father fought in World War II, and then my father’s father fought in Korea. And they’re both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana – and they never went back home.
Dee Rees
Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother.
Charles Bronfman
World War II was a decisive time in our history and June 6, 1944, marked the decisive moment of the war.
Lane Evans
We owe our World War II veterans – and all our veterans – a debt we can never fully repay.
Doc Hastings
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 persuaded themselves that they were not their brother’s keeper.
Hubert H. Humphrey
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
Doris Lessing
I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.
Herb Kelleher
Why is the N.F.L. so popular? The N.F.L. grew in the comfort zone after World War II. People had money and time. A popular American sport got bigger.
George Vecsey
In 1949, I saw a World War II veteran named Lou Brissie, who had nearly lost a lower leg in combat, pitch in the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.
George Vecsey
After World War II, the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism blew through the developing world.
Stephen Kinzer
Military action is, of course, sometimes necessary to maintain peace. Kosovo and World War II are good examples.
Kirsten Powers
I feel like I came from a generation where… We didn’t have Vietnam. We didn’t have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you’re kind of free to not grow up that way if you don’t want to.
Greg Mottola
As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase ‘nothing about us without us.’ To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.
Tom Malinowski
A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson’s vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.
Robert Dallek
Let’s not forget we created that ideal middle class by destroying all of our industrial competitors during World War II.
Jeff Greene
Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.
Noam Chomsky
The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo’s status.
Sebastian Junger
When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there’s so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time – World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.
Eric Betzig
In World War II, America was the Arsenal of Democracy, providing war materiel to our Allies that ultimately led to victory over tyranny.
Robert C. O’Brien
The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.
Helen Fisher
I served in World War II in our fight to defeat fascism.
Carl Reiner
I was hooked on aviation, made model airplanes, and never thought I would be able to fly myself. It cost too much. But then World War II came along and changed all that.
John Glenn
Being a black male in the Deep South after World War II

Being a black male in the Deep South after World War II, you could actually come home in your uniform and be lynched on the spot or be connected to some horses and buggies and dragged on the street in front of your wife and children.
Rob Morgan
Part of what I loved – and love – about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I’m interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I’m interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.
Steven Spielberg
World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment to Western Europe and the Far East.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
World War II… did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.
Graham Chapman
My father was a World War II Marine who became a high school principal. He always had a heart for students who maybe were underprivileged or had difficulty of some sort.
Lynn Good
World War II proves there’s no God.
Penn Jillette
When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.
Lukas Foss
When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.
Don Kardong
To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill’s powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had long admired. Kennedy was hardly unmindful of how important a great inaugural address could be.
Robert Dallek
When my father served in World War II, he wasn’t told, ‘Go to Europe for four months, for six months, and then you can come back, and there’ll be plenty of big bases there for you to serve on, and don’t worry about it.’
Michael T. Flynn
The notion of a neutral, mainstream national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.
Howard Fineman
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually – and among them many African-American – migrated to the Hampton Roads area because of the job boom that was happening. It was a place where you could get stable war jobs.
Margot Lee Shetterly
I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‘Wait a second? Didn’t we just get through with that?’
Clint Eastwood
The only other human endeavor on which there’s more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we’re going to pass that in 2013.
Steve Sabol
For women, World War II had offered an opportunity, and often the necessity, to get out of the house to work.
Cathleen Schine
The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.
Clint Eastwood
World War II has always been of great interest to me. I’ve known for decades that it was just one more war the politicians suckered us into.
Harry Browne
I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
Dave Brubeck
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR committed a most visionary act: He appointed a Harvard historian to write the official account of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Samuel Eliot Morison was given the rank of lieutenant commander, with the right to interview anyone of whatever status.
Alistair Horne
My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.
Mike Honda