The war changed everything. East of the Elbe, the Soviets and their local representatives inherited a sub-continent where a radical break with the past had already taken place. What was not utterly discredited was irretrievably damaged. Exiled governments from Oslo, Brussels or the Hague could return from London and hope to take up the legitimate authority they had been forced to relinquish in 1940. But the old rulers of Bucharest and Sofia, Warsaw, Budapest and even Prague had no future: their world had been swept aside by the Nazis' transformative violence. It remained only to decide the political shape of the new order that must now replace the unrecoverable past.

I was completely absorbed as to what would happen because anything was possible.

Mr. Greenwood, when moving the Amendment yesterday, told us that the war would shake many strongly held views. I fear that this war will do very much more than that. The war will bring about changes which may be fundamental and revolutionary in the economic and social life of this country. On that we are all agreed.

I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.

This decision is absolutely contrary to my understanding of what the plan was to be in the event of an invasion.

It amazed me how a diverse perspective utterly changed the meaning of every significant event in the world.

War was rapidly doing what war did—making ugly everything it touched.

Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.

There is something in a war carried on by invasion which makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war, because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains be for him, or against him, when her first obtains it.

If the result of a war is to change nothing, but only to destroy, with the mere result that a group of human beings who do not differ notably from the conquered acquires preponderant advantages for the future, there is lacking the affective strength of an existence that has inspired faith, of an existence whose destiny would have been decided by the war.

We are all adults and we are well aware that war depletes the Russian state in every way but if we stop it will make the special military operation meaningless.

I realised that if the submarine menace were not checked (and there seemed at that moment no expectancy that anything could prevent it from increasing in gravity) the War as far as we were concerned might end in starvation for this country.

A war is completely unavoidable.

I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped.