Spanish Civil War Quotes

• The pictures are there, and you just take them.

  Robert Capa

  Photography, Art, Photojournalism

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• I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

  Adam Hochschild

  Military, War, Airplane

  Source: www.npr.org

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• The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

  Robert Capa

  Photography, Truth Is, Best Picture

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• You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)

  Robert Capa

  War, Cameras, Truth Is

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• The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

  George Packer

  War, Writing, Together

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

  Adam Hochschild

  War, Political, Partisans

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Events, Example

  Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.13, Pantheon

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• Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], and it was, by far, the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever joined somebody else's civil war. I think they were primarily people who were deeply alarmed by the menace of fascism. They saw this on the horizon. I quote one volunteer, Maury Colow of New York, who said, "for us it was never Franco, it was always Hitler."

  Adam Hochschild

  New York, War, Thinking

  Source: www.npr.org

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• ... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

  Gertrude Stein

  War, History, Done

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.84, Random House

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• [Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

  Robert Hass

  War, Sick, Republican

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• When I wrote about the Spanish Civil War many years later, I used documents that I picked up when I was a child, as a lot hadn't been published (a lot more resources are available now).

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, War, Years

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.

  Nat Hentoff

  War, Thinking, Russia

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• I went through the communist children's movement at the age of nine, in 1930, and into the Young Communist League in 1936. The Spanish civil war brought me back. I'd already broken with the communists - or the Stalinists, more precisely - in 1935. But the civil war in Spain and the desire to aid the remarkable people struggling against Fascism brought me back to the Young Communist League, so that I could effectively participate, however far removed from Spain, in their struggle. By 1938 I was ready to be expelled. By 1939 I was expelled.

  Murray Bookchin

  Children, War, Struggle

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

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• Some of my earliest political feelings were based on the anti-Japanese bubblegum cards I got. There were also Spanish Civil War bubblegum cards. Awful.

  Ed Asner

  War, Political, Feelings

  "Ed Asner on crotchety roles from Lou Grant to Up". Interview with Will Harris, www.avclub.com. July 3, 2012.

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• I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

  Colm Toibin

  War, Mountain, Barcelona

  "This Week in Fiction: Colm Tóibín" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. February 24, 2013.

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• The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

  Clive Owen

  War, People, Stuff

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