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
“You told me once dear, you really loved me
And no one else could come between.
But now you've left me and love another;
You have shattered all my dreams.”
― Kate Avelynn, quote from Flawed
“The words I heard from you today, are said when there’s nothing left to say. What I would give to make you stay, I would give it all away.”
― Lang Leav, quote from Lullabies
“But words are vain; reject them all—
They utter but a feeble part:
Hear thou the depths from which they call,
The voiceless longing of my heart.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Phantastes
“She realized that adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one--that no one else could quite understand.”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from Journey to the River Sea
“For most of us, once something was busted, it was game over. I would have loved to know how it felt, just once, to have something fall apart and see options instead of endings.”
― Sarah Dessen, quote from Saint Anything
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