The Winds of War Quotes

“Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“The girl you marry and the woman you must make a life with are two different people.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“IT IS BETTER TO KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND LET PEOPLE THINK YOU’RE A FOOL, THAN TO OPEN IT AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“usurpation.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism."

[...]

"I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe.... He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderian’s massed tanks, the Führer halted Guderian on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days! To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts. During these three days the British rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the “miracle of Dunkirk.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“There are no difficulties that can’t be overcome,”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Tell me, Briny,” Natalie said, “are you still having fun?” He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture—a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion. They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets—all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Churchill was exactly the kind of brilliant amateur meddler in military affairs that Hitler was. Both rose to power from the depths of political rejection. Both relied chiefly on oratory to sway the multitude. Both somehow expressed the spirits of their peoples and so won loyalty that outnumbered any mistakes, defeats and disasters. Both thought in grandiose terms, knew little about economic and logistical realities, and cared less. Both were iron men in defeat. Above all, both men had overwhelming personalities that could silence rational opposition when they talked.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“steamy day, and though the windows of the oval study were open, the room was oppressively hot. “You know Captain Henry, of course, Admiral? His boy’s just gotten his wings at Pensacola.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Germany’s grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“In a solemn tone, like a priest chanting a mass, beating time in the air with a stiff finger, Slote quoted: " 'The German Revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte.  These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces  that only await their time to break forth.  Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then  will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage.  The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries.  Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.' "

Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammerblow, and went on: " 'Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers.  Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect.  The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder.  German thunder is of true German character.  It is not very nimble but rumbles along somewhat slowly.  But come it will. And when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.'

"Heine - the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy - Heine wrote that," Slote said in a quieter tone. "He wrote that a hundred and six years ago.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“scruple”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy. “Pug!”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Please tell Field Marshal Goring for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Henry wondered all through the meal whether Warren”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“There is no morality in world history. There are only tides of change borne on violence and death. The victors write the history, pass the judgments, and hang or shoot the losers. In truth history is an endless chain of hegemony shifts, based on the decay of old political structures and the rise of new ones. Wars are the fever crises of those shifts. Wars are inevitable; there will always be wars; and the one war crime is to lose. That is the reality, and the rest is sentimental nonsense.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler backdown was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.—V.H.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize—the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War