Tony Judt Quotes

It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.

Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance.

Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.

Under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers.

These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave.

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?

Children are extremely important. They are the future of the world.

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.

I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn't really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.

My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.

John Wayne was just a very conservative guy, who had not served in World War II, and he was defensive about that - he almost overcompensated his anti-Communism because of that reason.

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.

Coming into World War II, we were seen as a conquering hero for beleaguered people, we are now seen as invader, an occupier. And what that is saying is we have more might than right, so we kind of have a kind of moral deficit disorder. And that's why a leader must lift us back to the higher ground, because at the end of the day what makes you strong is that you are believable, that as significant as might is, ultimately right is even stronger than might.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.

my greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

History knows no greater display of courage than that shown by the people of the Soviet Union.

We shall solve this problem, and afterwards Warsaw as the Capital and the pool of intelligentsia of that nation will be destroyed.

We are all proud of is World War II where we went in, we were decisive, we came to the conclusion that freedom prevailed, and we were heroes.

When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment.

In World War II, the government went to the private sector. The government asked the private sector for help in doing things that the government could not do. The private sector complied. That is what I am suggesting.

Australia and New Zealand are now threatened by the might of the Imperial Japanese forces, and both of them should know that any resistance is futile.

I hate to say it, but I had a great time in World War II.