Lynne Olson > Quotes

“we’re inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“The German embassy in Washington had spent thousands of dollars to send fifty isolationist Republican congressmen to the convention to work for the adoption of an isolationist platform.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“As part of that effort, FDR authorized FBI investigations of his political opponents, who were branded by administration spokesmen and much of the press as subversives, fifth columnists, and even Nazis.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“It’s not surprising, then, that after conservatism made a comeback following the war and FDR’s death, one of its first targets would be the film industry.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Echoing Cantril’s view, George Gallup had earlier noted that “the best way to influence public opinion” on an issue was “to get Mr. Roosevelt to talk about it and favor it.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“In modern war … even those belligerents who are hampered by moral scruples must neglect no weapon that may be of service.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Pastor Hall was not the first anti-Nazi film to be barred by the board; in the previous two years, it had prohibited at least seven other such movies from being shown. At the same time, however, it allowed the release of Feldzug in Polen, a propaganda film produced by the German government that depicted the Wehrmacht’s vanquishing of Poland in 1939 and portrayed Poland as the aggressor.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“In the late 1930s and early 1940s, thousands of desperate Jews lined up each day in front of U.S. consulates in Germany, Austria, and other Nazi-controlled countries to apply for visas. However, with little sentiment in America for providing them with a means of escape, almost all were turned away.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Lindbergh would later write: “I shared the repulsion that democratic peoples felt in viewing the demagoguery of Hitler, the controlled elections, the secret police. Yet I felt that I was seeing in Germany, despite the crudeness of its form, the inevitable alternative to decline.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“He demonstrated a feminism very unusual for his time by encouraging her in all her undertakings and helping her overcome the obstacles that arose with her projects,” said Guillemette Andreu-Lanoë”
― Lynne Olson, Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction

“Pack herself told a journalist after the war: “I did my duty as I saw it. It involved me in situations from which respectable women draw back. But wars are not won by respectable methods.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“Happily for the Allies, none of those scenarios became reality. As Dean Acheson aptly put it, “At last our enemies, with unparalleled stupidity, resolved our dilemmas, clarified our doubts and uncertainties, and united our people for the long, hard course that the national interest required.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“For the two Western leaders, the alliance with Stalin posed a peculiar moral dilemma. Roosevelt and Churchill, the British military historian Max Hastings noted, "found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin's citizens to bear a scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations' sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept." As a result, they traded "dependence upon one tyranny"--the Soviet Union--for "the destruction of another"--Nazi Germany.
In doing so, they traded away Poland's future.”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Many years after the war, an American journalist asked Jeannie Rousseau, one of Marie-Madeleine’s operatives, why she had risked her life to join Alliance. “I don’t understand the question,” replied Rousseau, who was responsible for one of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war. “It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing. It was a must. How could you not do it?”
― Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

“[Ed Murrow]would remark during a BBC broadcast: "It is difficult to explain the meaning of cold to people who are warm, the meaning of privation to people who have wanted only for luxuries...It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“Above all, she talked about the great debt she owned her parents for encouraging her to do what she wanted and for providing her with unstinting support, not to mention stellar education, that enabled her to enter a male-only field and overcome the daunting challenges put in her way.”
― Lynne Olson, Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction

“While Eisenhower and his staff agonized over D-Dsy at Bushy Park, a frenzied carnival atmosphere took hold in overcrowded, clamorous London. Traffic was gridlocked, restaurants and clubs were packed, and it took days, sometimes weeks, for newcomers to the capital to find a vacant hotel room or flat. Many of the new arrivals were American journalists, flooding in from all over the globe to be on hand for the biggest story of the war. Ernie Pyle, who had come to London from Tunisia, wrote: "I decided that if the Army failed to get ashore on D-Day, there would be enough American correspondents to force through a beachhead on their own.”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“When he took charge of the Air Corps in 1938, it was in pitiful shape—a pale shadow of the mighty Luftwaffe or Britain’s Royal Air Force. Arnold himself called his service “practically nonexistent.” Ranked twentieth in size among the world’s air forces and still under Army control, it had a few hundred combat planes, many of them obsolete, and fewer than nineteen thousand officers and enlisted men.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Since bigotry traditionally flourishes in times of economic instability and unsettling social change, it’s not surprising that the Great Depression and its accompanying turmoil provided another fertile seedbed for intolerance toward Jews. “Economic hardship was taking its toll,” noted the Anti-Defamation League’s Arnold Forster. “People needed a scapegoat for their Depression miseries.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Just the night before, he had made another national broadcast, this one calling for conscription, repeal of the entire neutrality law, and the dispatch of massive numbers of planes and munitions to Britain—if necessary, in American ships and under American naval protection. “Short of a direct declaration of war, it would have been hard to frame a more complete program of resistance to the Nazis,” noted McGeorge Bundy, the future aide to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who helped Stimson write his autobiography after the war.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Underlying such suspicions was the enormous gulf of knowledge and understanding between America’s heartland and the East Coast—and in particular the East’s financial and cultural hub, New York City.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“Churchill almost single-handedly changed the mood of a nation. Shaking the British out of their lethargy, he imposed his “imagination and will upon his countrymen,”
― Lynne Olson, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II

“From then on, most of America First’s leaders would be midwestern businessmen whose social and political views were considerably more conservative than those of the group’s founders.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“While Smith, by all accounts, served his country loyally during the conflict, he and his wife remained ardent Roosevelt haters. When they heard in April 1945 that FDR had died, the Smiths “burst into roars of laughter” and embraced each other and a friend, who threw “his arms high in the air in exultation,” Katharine Smith wrote in an unpublished memoir. “The evil man was dead! I know how right we were to hate him so bitterly. There is no ill, foreign or domestic, that cannot be traced back directly to his policies. Our decline, our degeneracy stems from that man and his socialist, blinded, greedy wife.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and "a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed" while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?”
― Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

“Lindbergh decided that he and his family had no alternative but to leave America. “Between the … tabloid press and the criminal, a condition exists which is intolerable for us,” he wrote his mother. A few days before his departure, Lindbergh told a close friend that “we Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low.… It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others.”
― Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

“My parents were humanists,“ Desroches later told an interviewer. “They taught me humanist values such as respect for one another, for your neighbors, for people in general, respect for civilizations. My brother and I grew up in an environment very open to culture, music, and foreign languages.”
― Lynne Olson, Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction