Normandy Quotes

Our landings … have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops …. The troops, the air, and the navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

The eyes of the world are on you.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

If your pictures are not good enough, it’s because you are not close enough.

The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.

I can't count how many of my friends are in the cemetery at Normandy, the heroes are still there, the real heroes.

That road to V-E Day was hard and long, and traveled by weary and valiant men. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

I have returned many times to honour the valiant men who died...every man who set foot on Omaha Beach was a hero.

The first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor!

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

Granted, it's a long time ago, it's in the 1940s, and, granted, it's warfare that we hopefully will not conduct in a similar fashion ever again, but it is crucially important. And that act, the storming of the Normandy beaches, coupled with the Battle of the Bulge, ending the spread of Nazism throughout Europe, saved the world and it saved the world for freedom. And it was the United States that did it. And it was a bunch of 19- and 20- and 21-year-old people who did it.

My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.

Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom. Average Americans, the very Americans that our government now and this president does not trust to make a decision on your health care plan. Those Americans risked everything so they could make that decision on their health care plan.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

I always played football with my friends on the streets of Eure, in Normandy, not far from Paris.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?

To see for themselves what the United States has been willing to undertake in the name of freedom. We should all visit Normandy. We should pay homage to those brave Americans who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach and gave their lives for the freedom of others.