A. B. Yehoshua Quotes

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.

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

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

I did not want to be labelled 'the designer who survived the atomic bomb,' and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.

War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.

The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.

War is a defeat for humanity.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.

In old days nations could collect only portions of their men and resources at a time and dribble them out by degrees. Under modern conditions whole nations could be mobilized at once and their whole life-blood and resources poured out in a torrent. Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction. The financial strain and the expenditure of wealth would be incredible. I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me ; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

Stored today in the arsenals of the most enlightened Christian nations are enough bullets to kill every man, woman and child on earth.

Today, however, the world is deeply troubled everywhere and disorder seems endless. As the disasters that humankind may suffer are immeasurable, we sincerely hope to bring about a cessation of hostilities and a restoration of peace, and have therefore ordered the government to ally with Germany and Italy, nations which share the same intentions as ourselves ….

The unnecessary result of wartime hysteria.