Rick Atkinson Quotes
I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.
Quotes to Explore
-
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.
-
There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.
-
In high school I went on about three dates.
-
One makes war to win, not because it's just.
-
Beaten biscuits: This is the most laborious of cakes, and also the most unwholesome, even when made in the best manner. We do not recommend it; but there is no accounting for tastes. Children would not eat these biscuits-nor grown persons either, if they can get any other sort of bread. When living in a town where there are bakers, there is no excuse for making Maryland biscuit. Believe nobody that says they are not unwholesome. . . . Better to live on Indian cakes.
-
The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.
-
Sometimes you just gotta get in front of the camera because sometimes you have a long break between things, or you're auditioning and maybe nothing's really happening.
-
The safest way to ensure diversity of opinion is diverse ownership. But this ideal has been sacrificed by our government.
-
We know the left hemisphere has come online when children start to understand language and learn how to speak.
-
Being brought up in a Christian home and still identifying as Christian, I get pretty annoyed with the Christian lobbies around the world who say gay marriage destroys the family and all that kind of rubbish. They claim to follow someone who always stood up for the oppressed and marginalised.
-
Relentless and cynical traffic-trawling is bad for the soul.
-
I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.
-
There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.
-
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.
-
Hatred is a very underestimated emotion.
-
I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.
