Michael Winter Quotes

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

In Montana, where Sen. William Andrews Clark made his fortune and lost his reputation, people had assumed that all his children were long dead. After all, he was born in 1839 and was of age to serve in the Civil War.

My father was in the First World War.

My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children.

My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

My grandmother. She's someone I never met, and I would've loved to have met her. She's been a huge influence on our entire family, not just me. She is a mystery. It's not clear exactly what about her is truth and myth.

We will never know what would have happened if President Johnson had said no to more troops and more war [in Vietnam]. We do know what happened when he said yes.

We lay a mortgage on every unborn child for a hundred and more years to come. Mortgage his brain, his brawn, and every pulse of his heart in order to pay the debt, to buy the material to slaughter the men of our country. And that is not all, the greatest crime of war is the crime against the unborn. Read what they are doing. They are calling out every man, every young man, and every virile man from seventeen to forty-five or fifty years old; they are calling them out. All the splendid scientific force and energy of the splendid virile manhood are being called out to be food for the cannon, and they are leaving behind the degenerate, defective imbecile, the unfit, the criminals, the diseased to be the fathers of children yet to be born.

…primogeniture was founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.

The United States, after having risen to heights of courage and idealism in its entry and prosecution of the war, has gone to the other extreme in the making of peace. For taking this course history will probably be even less sparing of us than our present-day critics.

The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war...And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.

It does not seem reasonable to expect that on the grounds of being responsible for the war [WWI] they [Germany] will spontaneously pay crushing taxes to meet the reparation debt…. A tremendous debt has to be paid and powerful motives to that end are essential… in view of the calamity which has overtaken ex-enemy and Allied nations alike, German responsibility for the war cannot satisfy the Allied peoples as being the only criterion by which to measure the effort which the German people ought to make. The problem of Europe is how to preserve Germany as well as France…. If we really appreciated how deeply the war ate into the economic and social fabric of Europe we would be content for some years with a continuing system of partial moratoria aimed at keeping both debtor and creditor alive.

This generation and the one to come will not see the end in fact of the Great War, so far as our economic and social problems are concerned…. the Great War broke all business conditions away from their past moorings and left the world's affairs adrift in a stormy sea without compass or rudder.

A war between Austria and Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Hapsburgs—or perhaps the overthrow of both.

A World War with its incalculable ramifications will strengthen social democracy which sermonizes the virtues of peace. War could easily cost some rulers their thrones.

I do not believe for a moment that, at the end of this war [WWI], even if we stand aside, we should be able to undo what had happened … to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite us from falling under the domination of a single power … and we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and should not escape the most serious and grave consequences.

if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'.

I was so overwhelmed years ago, when I was a kid, by 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' I think it was the second movie I ever saw. I never got over that one.

When she died, Mom left me her letters and journals. Windows into things I would have been too young to understand when she was alive, or too busy, or too much of a know-it-all.

I visited Krakow about 10 years ago, and when you're named Krakowski, you are very welcomed. I loved every minute of it. They had 'Ally McBeal' on Polish TV. People offered to drive us out to our family's farm.

Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.

My dad told me he wanted me to join in the business, but nothing was firm. He was quite young when he died, so we hadn't talked about it in depth.

I think the Knight boys have a long history of disappointing their fathers.

I've learnt - and this pleases me - that my dad's cricketing life and my own will always be intertwined, even though I will finish far behind the number of appearances he made for Yorkshire and also his length of service at Headingley.