The thing about war is that it has two sides, ... The first is the absolute horror of it. The other thing about it is you meet absolutely marvelous people ... brave and extraordinary people.

After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.