These WWII quotes will inspire you. World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging WWII quotes, WWII sayings, and WWII proverbs.
Best WWII Quotes
- “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “The world must know what happened, and never forget.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “The eyes of the world are upon you.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” ~ George S. Patton
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“United in this determination and with unshakable faith in the cause for which we fight, we will, with God’s help, go forward to our greatest victory.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… We will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt , WWII quotes about America
- “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “December 7, 1941. A date which will live in infamy.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“I’ve had my fill of Hitler. These conferences called by the ringing of a bell are not to my liking. The bell is rung when people call their servants. And besides, what kind of conferences are these? For five hours I am forced to listen to a monologue which is quite fruitless and boring” ~ Benito Mussolini
- “I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I’d been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the Pacific during WWII, but the Marine drill instructors had nothing on Clem.” ~ Art Donovan
- “The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.” ~ James Forrestal
- “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” ~ Winston Churchill
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“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.” ~ Isoroku Yamamoto
- “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.” ~ Winston Churchill
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“The fruits of victory are tumbling into our mouths too quickly.” ~ Hirohito
- “We must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations” ~ Winston Churchill
- “The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages…onward, to victory!” ~ Joseph Stalin
- “Soldiers of the Reich! This day, you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome.” ~ Adolf Hitler
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“A military man can scarcely pride himself on having smitten a sleeping enemy; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten.” ~ Isoroku Yamamoto
- “Fuehrer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!” ~ Benito Mussolini
- “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “Dunkirk has fallen… with it has ended the greatest battle of world history. Soldiers! My confidence in you knew no bounds. You have not disappointed me.” ~ Adolf Hitler
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“When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” ~ William Halsey
- “We will accept nothing less than full Victory!” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.” ~ Chris Cleave
- “[For business after WWII ] democracy means getting people to regard government as an alien force that’s robbing them and oppressing them, not as their government. In a democracy, it would be your government.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow ” For better or for worse–it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option” ~ Tom Brokaw
- “Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.” ~ Chris Cleave
- “The thing about collaborators is that you don’t know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.” ~ Paul Virilio
- “To look back at history, during WWII, Rosie the Riveter and all that, when women needed to get to work, the US opened a LOT of daycare centers very fast. When we have the will, we do it; we’re capable of doing these things. Continuing to raise awareness is important.” ~ Megan Smith
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“There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.” ~ Mel Brooks
- “The Road To Serfdom was written during WWII, and basically it’s an anti-Nazi, anti-communist thing, but also it’s an anti-Conservative and anti-Labor-party thing aimed at the British. He was an Austrian, writing in Britain. And I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian – and, indeed, many conservative – ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.” ~ Sylvia Ann Hewlett
- “An era that I specifically like is sort of late 50’s, early 60’s. I guess mid 50’s too. I like these types of films that deal with post WWII America and this more complex leading man that kind of emerges from that.” ~ Alden Ehrenreich
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“I’m going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I’d like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It’s what I do.” ~ Rick Atkinson
- “I learned in grade-school that after WWII European politicians considered sending Jews to Madagascar instead of Palestine. At the time I thought: Madagascar would’ve been so great.” ~ Jill Soloway
- “Bernie Sanders is like those liberal members of the German National Socialist Party during the WWII, or of the Italian Fascist movement during Mussolini. They’d do much for their own workers and peasants, socially… as long as funds were flowing in from the countries plundered by their imperialism.” ~ Andre Vltchek
- “We don’t know our hearts until life puts us to the test, and WWII fascinates because it was the last time everyone was simultaneously pushed to their limit.” ~ Chris Cleave
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“I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.” ~ Chris Cleave
- “There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.” ~ Anthony Doerr
- “Thematically, we’re both [with Kristin Hannah ] interested in women’s experiences and women’s stories, and until now, you’ve mostly dealt with how it feels to be a wife/mother/sister/name your poison in today’s world. But this story [The Nightingale ] is told from the perspective of two sisters during the German occupation of France in WWII.” ~ Megan Chance
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“If you look back historically at the post-WWII period on average, if you get a 100-basis-point increase in Fed funds, the spillover to the ten-year is only 35 basis points, and 25 basis points into the 30-year – it’s a fairly small spillover effect.” ~ Gary Shilling
- “At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.” ~ Chris Cleave
- “I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic – an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.” ~ Bruce Feiler
- “No, I’m all man. I even fought in WWII. Of course, I was wearing women’s undergarments under my uniform.” ~ Ed Wood
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“I did a film called ‘Fort McCoy,’ based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States.” ~ Eric Stoltz
- “Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]” ~ Winston Churchill
- “As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.” ~ Zadie Smith
- “All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.” ~ Oliver North
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“Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn’t until the ’50s that people started talking about it.” ~ Eli Roth
- “A friend of ours said if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazis after WWII, that every single one of them, every last rich white one of them, from Truman on would be hung to death and shot. And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as war criminals.” ~ Zack de la Rocha , WWII quotes about death
- “‘Feminist comedy,’ practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies’ war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.” ~ Grace Slick
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“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.” ~ Reid Bryson
- “By…WWII, I.G. Farben had become…part of the most gigantic and powerful cartel of all history…interlocking agreements…over 2,000 of them…In the US, the cartel had established important agreements with” ~ G. Edward Griffin
- “The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights – and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America’s veterans – signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic, and moral landscape of the world.” ~ Peter Drucker
