Prewar.” It occurred to Rhyme that in Italy the phrase…

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

— Joseph Rotblat

“War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see…

— Robert Graff

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

I collect old first and second World War artifacts and things. I'm a little secret history nerd. I've been lucky enough to do quite…

— Jeremy Irvine

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as…

— Helen Mirren

“Great British painters, one might say, imitate the proverbial behaviour of buses. None come along for a century or more, then two at the…

— Martin Gayford

In Finland, we learned quite a lot from our own civil war. The wounds were visible when I was a boy, but my generation…

— Harri Holkeri

“History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War,…

— Hisham Matar

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared,…

— Anne Applebaum

You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a…

— Noam Chomsky

“The wealth of data to be found in social and political life. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is notoriously…

— Erich Fromm

Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that…

— Nicholson Baker

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

— Antony Beevor

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no…

— Tony Judt

My father was an air officer in the Second World War. My brother was a marine in Vietnam. When I was given this opportunity,…

— Valerie Plame