John Mahoney Quotes

It was post war. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.

I was born in Russia in 1901 of Jewish parents and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father, who left Russia for the United States before World War I.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.

There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

I grew up in the time of Germany after the war.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

I like coming to the United States because the United States played an important role in my life.

I'm a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school - Prior Park College in Bath - my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: 'In arrears.'

My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.

The United States is our most important ally. They helped us many times. Without the United States, the unification or German democratisation after the Nazi period would have been much more complicated, or almost impossible.

When I came to America from Sweden, Mother and I, we went to Chicago where our relatives lived.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

I'm really still a child of the Forties. I still think about it a lot, about the repercussions of armed conflict. Until 1953 we had rationing. We couldn't buy meat, we couldn't buy pleasurable goods like cigarettes and sweets. I didn't starve - my family were lucky - but I knew what it was like standing in line waiting for foodstuffs.

If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies; they say the United States won the war and saved the world.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

Personally I believe that the courses we followed for some years after World War II were enlightened, surprisingly imaginative and extremely effective.

I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

It took us 50 months in Germany, post World War II to go from the end of the war to a national election.

Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.