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Daily Inspiration Quote by Patrick Macnee

"The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps"

About this Quote

The sentence lands with the clumsy force of remembered censorship: not a polished line, but a jagged recollection of what it felt like to live inside an information blackout. Patrick Macnee isn’t offering a historian’s chronology; he’s describing the everyday choreography of wartime Britain, where “the radio” functioned less as a window on reality than as a managed instrument of morale. The awkward grammar (“even weren’t allowed”) actually helps: it signals a speaker reaching back for the texture of the time, when the unthinkable couldn’t be spoken aloud on the most trusted medium in the house.

Macnee’s intent is accusatory in a quiet way. He’s pushing against the comfortable modern fantasy that the public was fully informed and simply chose indifference. His phrasing implies a system that treated certain truths as dangerous knowledge, even when those truths were already happening. The subtext is about power: who decides what a nation can bear, and what gets sacrificed when leaders prioritize steadiness over clarity.

“Right, left and center” is the key piece of actorly, colloquial emphasis. It’s not meant to be numerically precise; it’s meant to convey the sense that death was omnidirectional, relentless, and yet somehow still kept off-air. The line also contains a moral sting: the camps are called “terrible,” but the real horror is the gap between catastrophe and broadcast, between mass murder and the silence of the living room.

Quote Details

TopicHuman Rights
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Macnee, Patrick. (n.d.). The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-radio-even-werent-allowed-to-say-there-was-a-169637/

Chicago Style
Macnee, Patrick. "The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-radio-even-werent-allowed-to-say-there-was-a-169637/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-radio-even-werent-allowed-to-say-there-was-a-169637/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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Radio were not allowed to say there was a Holocaust
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About the Author

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Patrick Macnee (born February 6, 1922) is a Actor from United Kingdom.

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