Cold War Conversations Podcast > Cold War Conversations Podcast's Quotes

“Gentlemen, this is a story that you shall tell your grandchildren, and mightily bored they'll be.”
― Lt General Brian Horrocks

“My bookshelves were groaning with WW2 books, Hitler's baleful eyes staring out at me from covers and spines for any new visitor (or passing burglar) to wonder if I might be a fan or at least mildly obsessed.”
― Al Murray

“I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.”
― Louise Walters, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase

“If morality is extinguished, there is no human being left.”
― Gitta Sereny

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson

“When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.”
― George Burns

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
― Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

“This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.”
― Alistair MacLean, Where Eagles Dare

“To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“Wie bald 'nicht jetz' 'nie' wird. How soon 'not now' becomes 'never'.”
― Douglas Kennedy, The Moment

“Later that afternoon with the Germans already in Trafalgar Square and advancing down Whitehall to take their position in the rear, the enemy unit advancing across St. James 'Park made their final charge. Several of those in the Downing Street position were already dead... and at last the Bren ceased its chatter, its last magazine emptied.

Churchill reluctantly abandoned the machine-gun, drew his pistol and with great satisfaction, for it was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, shot dead the first German to reach the foot of the steps. As two more rushed forward, covered by a third in the distance, Winston Churchill moved out of the shelter of the sandbags, as if personally to bar the way up Downing Street. A German NCO, running up to find the cause of the unexpected hold-up, recognised him and shouted to the soldiers not to shoot, but he was too late. A burst of bullets from a machine-carbine caught the Prime Minister in the chest. He died instantly, his back to Downing Street, his face toward the enemy, his pistol still in his hand.”
― Norman Longmate

“the remark of a Middlesex Regiment officer in 1918. “Intelligence services,” the man had said, “are prone to looking up their own arses and wondering why it’s dark.”
― David Downing, Zoo Station

“I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history's dizzying expanse.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories.”
― Miranda Richmond Mouillot, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”
― Carl Von Clausewitz

“So,” he throttled shift knob into fifth gear half a block from a stop sign, “you’re from Great Britain.”

“Yes. England. The North. Sheffield.”

“Why you guys drive on the left?”

“Obviously, because it’s right.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Are you?”

“I’m askin, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. Tradition, I suppose.”

“That’s a dumb-ass reason.”

“Then perhaps you should start driving on the left.”
― Kevin Cole

“I didn’t know you were interested in politics,’ I said. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country?”
― Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
― Winston Churchill

“There is an innocence in the very word "afternoon." Morning is for trains and business and hangovers, night is for love and burglary. The afternoon is the halcyon, the calm between earnestness and drama.”
― Adam Hall