War and Remembrance Quotes

“In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.

For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact it turns away, as though refusing credence will conjure away the reality.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“All the corpses must be brought back from the work site for the evening roll call, since the count of living and dead has to match the number of men who left in the morning, to establish that nobody has escaped Auschwitz except by dying.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Extremism, he says, is the universal tuberculosis of modern society: a world infection of resentment and hatred generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old values. In the stabler nations the tubercles are sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless lunatic movements. In times of social disorder, depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break forth and infect the nation. This has happened in Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United States.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Either war is finished, or we are.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon?

But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world.... Men fight as far from home as they can be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Albert Speer, Hitler’s astute production chief, is reported to have chided an American Air Force general, after the war, for not laying on more raids like Dresden; it was the sovereign way to end the war, he said, but the Allies failed to follow through.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Such are the stories that Bronka Ginsberg tells Jastrow while toiling up the mountain trail. “Sidor Nikonov is really not a bad man, for a goy,” she sums up, sighing. “Not a wild beast like some. But my grandfather was a rabbi in Bryansk. My father was the president of the Zhitomir Zionists. And look at me, will you? A forest wife. Ivan Ivanovitch’s whore.” Jastrow says, “You are an aishess khayil.” Bronka, ahead of him on the trail, looks back at him, her weatherbeaten face coloring, her eyes moist. Aishess khayil, from the Book of Proverbs, means “woman of valor,” the ultimate religious praise for a Jewess. Late”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“... God knows I pity the Dresden women and children whose charred bodies are propped up in Goebell's propaganda photographs , but nobody made the Germans follow Hitler . He wasn't a legitimate ruler . He was a man with a mouth , and they liked what he said . They got behind him and they let loose a firestorm that's sucking all the decent instincts out of human society . My peerless son died fighting it . It made savages of all of us . Hitler gloried in savagery , he proclaimed it as his battle cry , and the Germans shouted Sieg Heill ! They still go on laying down their misguided lives for him , and the lives of their unfortunate families . I wish them joy of their Fuhrer while he lasts .”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“assailing her. Were they doing the”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“Of course the Russians under Zhukov were”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“have. He really PURSUED me, in a gentlemanly way, showing”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“jocose”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“anodyne”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“War has always been violent blindman’s buff, played with men’s lives and nations’ resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“A democracy in a backward or unstable country simply gets smashed by the best-organized power gang.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“shot at. All I did at Wotje was lose control”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“But I’m honestly not sure at this late hour of my life, Natalie, whether human nature is happier under tyranny, with its fixed codes, its terrorized quiet, its simple duties, or amid the dilemmas and disorders of freedom. Byzantium lasted a thousand years. It’s doubtful whether America will last two hundred. I’ve lived more than ten years in a Fascist country, and I’ve been more at peace than I ever was in the money-chasing hurly-burly back home. I really fear an American 1918, Natalie. I fear a sudden falling apart of those unloving elements held together by the common pursuit of money. I foresee horrors in defeat, amid abandoned skyscrapers and grass-grown highways, that will eclipse the Civil War! A blood bath with region against region, race against race, every man’s hand against his brother, and all hands against the Jews.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“War is politics implemented by the use of force.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“face grew longer and grimmer as Berel”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“an outstanding engineer, an”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“harridan”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“chiaroscuro,”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“pellucid”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“anodyne,”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance