The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up… After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can’t behave so abominably anymore. All right, we’re not free. But we are used to that, Mr....

No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into...

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when...

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn’t have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die – anything to stop remembering.

In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in...

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of...

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after...

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she...

Roy

if something does go wrong, here is my advice… KEEP CALM and CARRY ON.

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn’t greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize...

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is...

…we’re dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell.

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I...

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military...

That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die...

On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing,...

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn’t let too much truth seep into your conversation,...

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since...

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world,” wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out...

I was on one of my world ‘walkabouts.’ It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew...

In wartime, everyone’s birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad.

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds...

It doesn’t happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in...

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every...

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where...

Does the surgeon spare the cancer because he must cut to remove it? We are cruel. Of course we are cruel.

Above all, let’s hope we never take ourselves too seriously.

It was not,’ said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, ‘very easy to be good then.

The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had...

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chamberswere built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same...

When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol’s ‘hooks’ were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of...

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise. […] The central subject, the essence,...

[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.]Yes […] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being evil (because of World War II),...

Schnell, schnell.” There are men and women of all ages, even children. Among them I see one of my former students, Jeanine Crémieux. She got married in 1941 and had a baby last spring. She...

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice...

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s...

I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God’s...