Richard Corliss Quotes

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

I was given several types of torture… I was given what they called the ‘water cure’…I felt…like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

'Zero Dark Thirty' is a disturbing, fantastically-made movie. It will make you hate torture.

The Manchurian Candidate was the most important movie I was in, let's face it.

My father was one of the first six guys ashore on Iwo Jima. He's 86 years old now, and every single night of his life, he has nightmares, and he wakes yelling.

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

Surely, it's one of terrorism's intended effects, to literally stun our morale, to blow up strength and will along with buildings, and the reaction is hard to counter.

No, no, I didn't know him. He lost his mind around 1917 because of the tragedy of the Armenians.

Horror movies started to wane around the onset of World War II, and after World War II, when all the troops came home, people weren't really interested in seeing horror movies, because they had the real horror right on their front doorsteps.

E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

Let us never forget that terrorism at its heart, at its evil heart, is a psychological war. It endeavors to break the spirit and the resolve of those it attacks by creating a lose-lose situation.

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business.

The soldiers were trained to strap explosives onto their bodies and throw themselves under the American tanks that were expected in the invasion of Japan. We were a military hospital and were required to so train medical orderlies.

The unnecessary result of wartime hysteria.

I do not contend that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect. But warfare is never pleasant... would you rather be temporarily deranged... by a chemical agent, or burned alive...?

No military tactic is unreasonable if it can further destroy enemy morale and quickly.

Leaflet operations should be expanded to obtain maximum practicable psychological effect on the North Vietnamese population.