Post-War Quotes

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

We benefited from an enlightened post-war period in the United States: Our National Institutes of Health have enthusiastically and generously supported basic research.

When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.

People blame the 1960s for just about everything these days, but it was the decade when all that post-war furtiveness and small-mindedness was finally blown open, and opportunity really came knocking.

To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.

The first thing I learned was the ‘St Louis Blues’ when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.

We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We’ll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won’t be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that’s been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.

Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.

The older generation may see us as plucky little Britain, on the Edge of Europe. But more and more of the post-war generation see Britain as a less beautiful, more cramped, more snobbish, less glamorous version of America.

In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger – and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.

In the case of Bosnia, studies showed that turning to religion was a consequence of post-war depression and dissatisfaction.

Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.

The blood and sweat shed by United States and United Nations troops proved to be the prime mover behind the realisation of freedom throughout the post-war period.

As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.

Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.

Putin’s Russia is our adversary and moral opposite. It is committed to the destruction of the post-war, rule-based world order built on American leadership and the primacy of our political and economic values.

The history of post-war Britain shows us that we are lousy at running our economy. We need someone to do it for us.

In a way, the debate about Margaret Thatcher in Britain has just gotten fossilized in this notion that she is either this she-devil who wrecked the industrial base of the country and ruined the lives of millions, or she is the blessed Margaret who saved the nation and rescued us from our post-war decline.

The United States basically accepted protection abroad as the price of post-war recovery. Now, that these countries have caught up to our level of prosperity, it is time for them to catch up to our level of openness.

The U.S. diplomacy in trying to bring around small-undecided nations to support its resolution to attack Iraq has been marked by threats and blandishments. The blandishments held out are a piece of the pie of the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

‘Collaborator’ is a hostage tragicomedy, but it’s also, kind of, everything I know about post-war America. Well, not everything, but it does reference a lot of the post-war period.

The generation which lived through the Second World War is disappearing. Post-war generations see Europe’s great achievements – liberty, peace and prosperity – as a given.

Ultimately, Boris Johnson and the political and financial support behind his Brexit project are probably the biggest threat to both British democracy and the post-war welfare state settlement we’ve faced in the post-war period.

The only time that Labour has convincingly come from opposition to win has been in 1997 in the post-war period. And to do that we had to tack quite substantially to the right.

‘Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising’ by Winston Fletcher – the impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic, self-serving, occasionally brilliant but ultimately shallow business.

Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. Relations between Berlin and Paris are unusually poor, with some French politicians decrying the ‘selfish intransigence’ in the euro crisis of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.

I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.

All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?

As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan – in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.