The Duel Quotes

“I am writing this because on that night of the tenth of May in the 1,940th year of Our Lord, Churchill stood for more than England. Millions of people, especially across Europe, recognized him now as the champion of their hopes. (In faraway Bengal India there was at least one man, that admirably independent writer and thinker, Nirad Chaudhuri, who fastened Churchill's picture on the wall of his room the next day.) Churchill was _the_ opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal, and new.”
― John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler

“AFTER THE war had come in September 1939 Simone Weil wrote on a fragment of paper: “… we need first of all to have a clear conscience. Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in such a confrontation.”
― John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill & Hitler

“It was, and remains, inspiring that in their duel, on which the destinies of the world depended, near the middle of the twentieth century, toward the end of the Modern Age, a great statesman prevailed over a great revolutionary; the writer over the orator; a cosmopolitan over a racist; a democratic aristocrat over a populist demagogue; a traditionalist over a radical; a patriot over a nationalist — during the Second World War which was a catastrophe for millions of people but whose outcome spared the world an even worse one.”
― John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler

“We are all national socialists now.”
― John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler