Oliver Stone · 784 pages
Rating: (1.8K votes)
“To fail is not tragic. To be human, is.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Most American view World War II nostalgically as the "good war," in which the United States and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism. The rest of the world remembers it as the bloodiest war in human history. By the time it was over, more than 60 million people lay dead, including 27 million Russians, between 10 million and 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, 5.5 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese, and 1.5 million Yugoslavs. Austria, Great Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and the United States each counted between 250,000 and 333,000 dead.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. … And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“The Nation observed, “If you steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250,000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you’re a financier.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Either you're born crazy or you're born boring.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people’s very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Despite the well-deserved criticism, controlling public opinion became a central element in all future war planning.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another. Researchers have been trying for years to determine the precise nature of Bush’s ties to Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist who played a crucial role in bankrolling Hitler, as revealed in his 1941 memoirs I Paid Hitler. Thyssen ultimately repudiated the Nazi dictator and was himself imprisoned.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“the Berlin Wall failed to elicit a jubilant response on his part. He explained,”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
“The fantasies of ‘academic freedom’ . . . cannot protect a professor who counsels resistance to the law and speaks, writes, disseminates treason. That a teacher of youth should teach sedition and treason, that he should infect, or seek to infect, youthful minds with ideas fatal to their duty to the country, is intolerable.”
― Oliver Stone, quote from The Untold History of The United States
Oliver Stone
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date September 15, 1946
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“If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from What's Wrong with the World
“[...] one louing howre
For many yeares of sorrow can dispence:
A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sowre”
― Edmund Spenser, quote from The Faerie Queene
“They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
― William Faulkner, quote from A Rose for Emily and Other Stories
“It’s forty kilometers through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?”
― James Thurber, quote from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
“Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he’s there. I would say that this is the time when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires nothing, and instead of playing with his fellow men like they were toys, he meets them in the midst of their folly. The only difference between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can’t. A man who sees has no longer an active interest in his fellow men. Seeing has already detached him from absolutely everything he knew before.”
― Carlos Castaneda, quote from A Separate Reality
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