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They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

— Arthur Travers Harris

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Source and credibility

Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: Statement of 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign against Germany, as quoted in "Sir Arthur Harris & The Lancaster Bomber" at The British Postal Museum and Archive
Source quality: Secondhand citation Quoted from another book or article rather than from the original.

More by Arthur Travers Harris

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

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More quotes by Arthur Travers Harris

In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. … They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really - they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007)

People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I’ve come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they’ve never looked out of a window.

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007)

We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for them to go on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Travers Harris (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.