Maurice Ravel Quotes

When I assumed command of the Pacific Fleet in 31 December, 1941; our submarines were already operating against the enemy, the only units of the Fleet that could come to grips with the Japanese for months to come. It was to the Submarine Force that I looked to carry the load until our great industrial activity could produce the weapons we so sorely needed to carry the war to the enemy. It is to the everlasting honor and glory of our submarine personnel that they never failed us in our days of peril.

They have given their sons to the military services. They have stoked the furnaces and hurried the factory wheels. They have made the planes and welded the tanks. Riveted the ships and rolled the shells.

In war it is not men, but the man who counts.

I think that Sir Winston Churchill, in the period that the Germans occupied the Channel Ports, when the whole war hung in issue, fulfilled a role, which is as great as any role in our history.

However, I have a lot of greed. The types of music I want to show are on this side and on that side. Conclusively, if I'm able to make good music and people continue to look for my music, won't this kind of controversy get better... is my thought.

I think that most people don't think in terms of an American revolution, they think in terms of a Russian revolution, or even a Ukrainian revolution. But the idea of an American revolution does not occur to most people. And when I came down to the movement milieu seventy-five years ago, the black movement was just starting, and the war in Europe had brought into being the "Double V for Victory" [campaign]: the idea was that we ought to win democracy abroad with democracy at home. And that was the beginning of an American revolution, and most people don't recognize that.

I wonder why do wars suddenly start and suddenly stop, and why do we Brits and you Americans get involved in some of them and not in others? Is it possible that the arms manufacturers quietly foment wars without us knowing? Dropping bombs is a very profitable business for them. Gore Vidal was talking about this the other day, and he made a lot of sense. Whenever American policy seems inscrutable, he said, remember the military-industrial complex. He's the one who should have been President.

There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you're in some common mission together. You have to hope it's not going to take a war to bring that back to America again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.

It is the Germans who are responsible for the fact that I became a fabricator of arms. If not for them, I would have constructed agricultural machines.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

There's a disconnect there between - you're telling me this [war in Iraq] is fight of our generation, and you're going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that's gonna do it. I'm sure what [George W.Bush] would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can't, because he doesn't have them.

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.

The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed.

Peace will never be won if men reserve for war their greatest efforts, Peace, too, requires well-directed and sustained sacrificial endeavor. Given that, we can, I believe, achieve the great goal of our foreign policy, that of enabling our people to enjoy in peace the blessings of liberty.

And don't think that by eating freedom fries you are being patriotic and helping the war effort. Use less gasoline, read a newspaper. You know what, how about we cool it with the freedom fries anyway you fat asses. We're the fattest country in the world. Have you ever walked around an American mall? It's nothing but chick fillets and Lane Bryant track suits busting at the seams.

I had kissed my share of men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, thought, was something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it was a promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you will have me, then.

It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years.

In every major war we have fought in the 19th and 20th centuries. Americans have been asked to pay higher taxes - and nonessential programs have been cut - to support the military effort. Yet during this Iraq war, taxes have been lowered and domestic spending has climbed. In contrast to World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, for most Americans this conflict has entailed no economic sacrifice. The only people really sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families.

No one will deny that the excessive use of alcohol and alcoholic beverages would do more than any other single factor to make impossible a total war effort.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

In war, men are nothing, one man is everything.

During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.

Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history. . . . All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago. All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written

[A]t the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisers and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the "war against terrorism" by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an "ideological state apparatus.

Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.