Home > Work > The Greatest Generation

The Greatest Generation QUOTES

The Greatest Generation QUOTES

1 " A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

2 " there on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness. "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

3 " There has never been a military operation remotely approaching the scale and the complexity of D-Day. It involved 176,000 troops, more than 12,000 airplanes, almost 10,000 ships, boats, landing craft, frigates, sloops, and other special combat vessels--all involved in a surprise attack on the heavily fortified north coast of France, to secure a beachhead in the heart of enemy-held territory so that the march to Germany and victory could begin. It was daring, risky, confusing, bloody, and ultimately glorious [p.25] "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

4 " sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith. "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

5 " Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed, to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” —From John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, January 1961 Given "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

6 " how to prepare a young generation to run a large, modern, and complex industrial society. Nearly "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

7 " appropriately "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

8 " His superiors in the Merchant Marine were astonished. Here he was, ready to go back to the security of the Merchant Marine Academy for another eighteen months of accelerated training, and he wanted to quit to join one of the most dangerous outfits in the service. His officer offered him a thirty-day furlough to think it over. Broderick said, “No, my mind’s made up. "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

9 " Tom Broderick spent seventeen weeks in basic training for the infantry in Mineral Wells, Texas, before heading to Fort Benning, Georgia, to become a member of the 82nd Airborne. When he finished his training, a captain offered him an instructor’s job and the rank of sergeant. Again Broderick refused the safer alternative, saying he wanted to stay with his outfit and go overseas. Broderick "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

10 " immediately, the Battle of Arnhem. It was a joint mission of American and British paratroopers, and their objective was to take the Nijmegen bridge to help pave the Allies’ way into Germany and to discourage any German counterattack. “We jumped at about five hundred feet because we wanted to be a low target. It was one-thirty in the afternoon. “The first "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

11 " gesture "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

12 " postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

13 " despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

14 " came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

15 " Martin Luther "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

16 " present visitors with a tiny beaded pin of the American and Irish flags. It was a big turnout the day I was there, eighteen "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

17 " Father Joe Collins, "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

18 " At one time he owned as many as three buildings divided up into rental units. It was as a landlord and as a black man who had overcome so much on his own that he came to hate the welfare system that grew so fast in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. “It just killed ambition,” according to Holmes. “I had all of these tenants who in their late twenties had never worked a day in their life. They just waited around for that government check. No incentive. "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

19 " A common lament of the World War II generation is the absence today of personal responsibility. Broderick remembers listening to an NPR broadcast and hearing an account of how two boys found a loaded gun in one of their homes. The visiting boy accidentally shot his friend. The victim’s father was on the radio, talking about suing the gun manufacturer. That got to Tom Broderick. “So,” he said, “here’s this man talking about suing and he’s not accepting responsibility for having a loaded gun in the house.” Tom knows something about personal responsibility. He’s been forced to live as a blind man for more than fifty years, and when asked about the moment when the lights were literally shot out of his eyes, he says only, “It was my fault for getting too high in the foxhole. That happens sometimes. "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation

20 " established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld’s Army coats with the major’s insignia still attached, I remember thinking, "

― Tom Brokaw , The Greatest Generation