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World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.


Stephen Ambrose

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World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment ...
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that ...
PAT BUCHANAN When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It w...
ANG LEE The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or ou...
JIM BUNNING The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps t...
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I was a little girl in World War II and I'm used to being freed by Americans.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good ...
KEN FOLLETT American soldiers wore khaki uniforms during World War II. Men's khaki trousers became fashionab...
ROGER STONE The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World W...
FEISAL ABDUL RAUF The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese American...
RAND PAUL In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor." James Franck, The...
JAMES FRANCK Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue deve...
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaste...
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. PAPERS PROJECT During the war (World War II) when meat was rationed, customers brought meat to the restaurant to ke...
COLLEEN STOGSDILL How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs ...
GUNTER GRASS Just when you think this war has taken everything you loved, you meet someone and realize that someh...
RUTA SEPETYS A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next r...
GEORGE ORWELL In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron...
HERBIE HANCOCK It was necessary for us to discover greater powers of destruction than our enemies. We did. But afte...
THOMAS J. WATSON We need only look to our Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to see the value that Native langua...
RICK RENZI Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War gave America's involvement in world affairs a clea...
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI the most horrendous, unimaginable war crimes committed in Europe since the end of World War II.
RATKO MLADIC I don't know why in the world they got Vietnam and Korean war memorials up, and they didn't have any...
EILEEN MEADORS World War II has continued well after it was 'finished'
LEIF ERICSSON LEO VENESS Today, 90 percent of them are World War II veterans, now in their 80s.
KATHY WOOLRIDGE The intelligence community was stuck. It was stuck in Cold War ways, Cold War thinking, Cold War cul...
AMY ZEGART World War II was the last 'pure' war. It was purely heroic. There was someone who tried to c...
MORTEN TYLDUM It looks like a bombed-out building from World War II,
BOBBY WELCH America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpa...
SAM KEAN We want to make sure the World War II guys and the Korean (War) guys see that the museum is complete...
JAMES LIVINGSTON People say you should give until it hurts. I say you should give until it stops hurting. Know what I...
ELIZABETH BERG Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.
ELIZABETH BERG This year our Memorial Day activities are especially poignant as "The Greatest Generation" joins us ...
LANE EVANS Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm goin...
J. D. SALINGER Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm goin...
J.D. SALINGER No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime...
GUY SAJER World War II was the last government program that really worked.
GEORGE WILL World War II was the last government program that really worked.
GEORGE F. WILL I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
DAVE BRUBECK A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World ...
ROBERT DALLEK John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bom...
ISAAC ASIMOV I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.
GEORGE MCGOVERN There are few historians who would challenge the fact that the funding of World War I, World War II,...
G. EDWARD GRIFFIN Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our hist...
STEPHEN AMBROSE World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an ar...
HERMAN KAHN The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the...
JONATHAN GLOVER Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bomb...
ISAAC ASIMOV At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kep...
NIGEL HAMILTON The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.
RAMSEY CLARK World War II was a decisive time in our history and June 6, 1944, marked the decisive moment of the ...
LANE EVANS World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen y...
GORE VIDAL John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II...
ISAAC ASIMOV There are diverse opinions around the world. Yes, I even hear my countrymen say that when America wa...
ALFONSO NUNZIANTE The Melvin probably was the only destroyer to sink a battleship in World War II.
JACK GREEN The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.
JOSEPH ROTBLAT The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian ...
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF After World War II, the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism blew through the developing world.
STEPHEN KINZER Most of the World War II veterans are in their 80s now, and many are dying. Their families are putti...
GARY MCMASTER This is the first major turnaround in development assistance since World War II.
ROBERT ORR It's a very important part of the 20th century and World War II.
LARRY WILCOX All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude ...
JIM RAMSTAD World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.
JIM WEBB For women, World War II had offered an opportunity, and often the necessity, to get out of the house...
CATHLEEN SCHINE The result of these shared experiences was a closeness unknown to all outsiders. Comrades are closer...
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE During the discussion, we were talking about World War II. It triggered memories about the war and w...
DARLA MYERS As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who h...
GUY SAJER I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps t...
ALBERT EINSTEIN In wartime, everyone's birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad.
DANNY M. COHEN The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
OMAR N. BRADLEY The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
OMAR BRADLEY In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently...
GENE TIERNEY Registration is a World War II response, and we need a 1980 solution.
PATRICIA SCHROEDER Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much mor...
MONICA CROWLEY All through the years since World War II, the Japanese people have, I am convinced, made strenuous e...
EISAKU SATO Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
GRACE MURRAY HOPPER He wasn't in World War II and neither was his speech writer.
DAVID GRAHAM It's not only World War II, but we're losing Vietnam veterans, Korean.
ED SANDERS I think nothing has been filmed as much as World War II.
DAVID AYER Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb ...
ALBERT EINSTEIN We do have a couple of World War II tanks and other vehicles we can trace to a war, but this will be...
CHAD DANIELS Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II.
KURT MASUR This could possibly be the worst period of Sino-Japanese relations since World War II.
JAMES MULVENON If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies; they say the Un...
BOB FELLER The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order durin...
HELEN THOMAS February 19, 1942, is the year in which Executive Order 9066 was signed, and this was the order that...
XAVIER BECERRA World War II was still going on. It was very hard to get any kind of electronic components. The chie...
BOB CARROLL I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of ...
WALTER DEAN MYERS I only take vitamin B complex. Before World War II, I used to take ionized yeast, because in the pre...
JOHN GOKONGWEI Years ago, how do you think they made the atomic bomb? ... By having people with the brains to do it...
JAMES LOGAN The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam w...
RICHARD HOLBROOKE That's a first. The Guard can't claim that (level of combat) for World War II or World War I ? the o...
LES MELNYK 'War on terror' is a misnomer. It would be like calling America's involvement in World W...
DINESH D'SOUZA The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men w...
J. ANTHONY LUKAS World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER The bombings of World War II couldn't have looked any worse than some neighborhoods near here.
BILL KAVANAUGH DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told Whit Burnett... that on D-Day he was carrying six chapters of 'The Catc...
SHANE SALERNO That's where we're different. It's for the living as well as those that died, those that served in W...
JACK ROGERS World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaboratio...
JON MEACHAM Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of fa...
GUY SAJER

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AMBROSE BIERCE Compromise. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of ...
AMBROSE BIERCE Alliance. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserte...
AMBROSE BIERCE ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply in...
AMBROSE BIERCE Acquaintance is a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor and obscure, and intima...
AMBROSE BIERCE ARSENIC, n. A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom it greatly affects in turn."Eat ...
AMBROSE BIERCE