I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, r...
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me o...
I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.
Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.
The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history—the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen
War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.
It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.
The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.
So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.
You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.
In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.
I have no interest in dying. But I have to. I have to care one day about things that don't matter to me.
In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Maybe it's time to stop being a soldier and go home to be a father. And a husband for Deanna. I'm not sure how.
The happiness of a family is such a complex matter. Like a table laid out with a tea service, it looks so ordinary until it's threatened. Then it becomes infinitely precious.
I refuse to believe that gods want to make mortals unhappy and torment them. That's what humans do. And humans are very definitely not divine.
Of course he was afraid of war. Only fools are not. Anaxantis was no fool. He was fully prepared to fight, but only as a last resort.
Someday this war will be over. A new order of the world will appear in its place. The idea of Socialism will prevail. In the future they’ll remember us as heroes.” Thorkild aka ‘Borge’ The Informer by Steen Langstrup
There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.
