Top 100 Quotes About The First War
#1. As wretched as she was, she wanted Harry to be miserable, too. And yet, she was aware of an underlying sense of sadness. Theirs may have been the first war in which there were no winners, only losers.
Sharon Kay Penman
#2. I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
Abba Eban
#3. Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.
Dan Savage
#4. Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#5. People have been making war for thousands of years, but each time it is as if it is the first war ever waged, as if everyone has started from scratch. A
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#6. The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions.
Tariq Ali
#7. Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.
Merrill McPeak
#8. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
Michael Parenti
#9. It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.
William Westmoreland
#10. The first war zone was declared by Great Britain. She gave us and the world notice of it on the 4th day of November, 1914. The zone became effective Nov. 5, 1914.
George William Norris
#11. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces.
Peter Arnett
#12. According to Robert, his friend Moses was a soldier in the first war, as he described it. He fought Indians and soldiers in red coats.
Nancy B. Brewer
#13. Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
William Westmoreland
#14. As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.
Asne Seierstad
#15. With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination.
Mitsuo Fuchida
#16. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.
Marie Colvin
#17. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.
Karl Marlantes
#18. Go back," he said.
"Can't. Stand aside?"
"Can't."
"So it's like that?" I said.
Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. "Yeah."
And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.
Jim Butcher
#19. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Junger
#20. You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
Alexandra Fuller
#21. The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
Sebastian Junger
#22. I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'
Tom Hiddleston
#23. Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
Fiona McIntosh
#24. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
David Halberstam
#25. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained.
Joe Haldeman
#26. He said that if we were going to have a war, they would never be the first ones to start it.
Samantha Smith
#27. Well, first of all, I have to say that Iraq has already used weapons of mass destruction against her own people and against Iranians during their long war, so we know that weapons of mass destruction are existent with the Iraqis.
Richard Armitage
#28. What is the first thing we did when we took control of Iraq? Protect the oil fields. Remember the administration quote about how the oil would pay for the war.
Peter Schuyler
#29. I was against it [war in Middle East]. And I was against it very early. And we shouldn't have been in there. And I think it is probably perhaps the worst mistake we have ever made. First of all, they didn't knock down the World Trade Center, OK? It wasn't Iraq. It was other people.
Donald Trump
#30. I was the first blogger on the 'Times's website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn't fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people.
Nicholas Kristof
#31. On a basic level, he had seen first-hand how his government used the element of fear to accomplish its objectives; the same element of fear that had been used as an excuse to engage its huge war machine in conflicts for the profits of America's oligarchy.
Kenneth Eade
#33. The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?
Joe Haldeman
#34. Child: "The Major and the soldiers and Mycroft told me what war is like. They say it's the second worst thing in the world."
Man: "That's an interesting definition. What did they say is the worst thing?"
Child: "Not having anything worth fighting for in the first place.
Ada Palmer
#35. Although tyranny ... may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
Hannah Arendt
#36. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.
Wilfred Burchett
#37. People talk about games and loneliness - it's a lonely activity. I didn't understand that. 'Gears of War' was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn't sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.
Tim Schafer
#38. No," I said softly, feeling all the energy run out of me. I was tired. So, so tired. "I don't want a war. I ... I can't unleash something like that."
Then, for the first time so far, Dorian spoke.
"I can," he said.
Richelle Mead
#39. I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.
Fritz Sauckel
#40. Artillery raining fire on his tiny village Jabla on the Line of Control (LoC). War has numbed him, so has devastation. Yet nothing had prepared him for the havoc of Saturday morning. He was taking a nap, having had his pre-dawn Ramzan meal. At first there
Anonymous
#41. How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?
Peter Watts
#42. he said that when the baby was born, if it was a boy, I was to call it Edward."
"Edward?" Teddy repeated blankly.
"After you."
And for the first time in the whole of the war Teddy broke.
Kate Atkinson
#43. In war, truth is the first casualty.
Aeschylus
#44. The movie I've seen the most times, boy, that's a tough one. It would have to be a toss-up between Apocalypse Now and the first Star Wars. I think the first Star Wars.
David Crosby
#45. The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.
Jon Ronson
#46. In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.
Theresa Sjoquist
#47. It's a class war, and a war on young people too ... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.
Noam Chomsky
#48. I have spent my life in the study of military strength as a deterrent to war, and in the character of military armaments necessary to win a war. The study of the first of these questions is still profitable, but we are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#49. First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. This lesson we learned in World War II. I lived that lesson in Europe. Others lived it in the Pacific. Millions of American veterans learned it well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#50. If you ever get a war without blood and gore, well, I'll be the first to go.
Phil Ochs
#51. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
Tim O'Brien
#52. Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
Henry Louis Gates
#53. According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.
Kenneth Waltz
#54. I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.
Barack Obama
#55. The first act in the training of a warrior should be how to string his rifle and turn it into a guitar
Agona Apell
#56. The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that.
Agnes Varda
#57. Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.
Philip Roth
#58. In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#59. In war, the first casualty is truth.
Aeschylus
#60. When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first ... Of course, to observe is not its real duty, we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed ... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.
Alan Turing
#61. The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.
Winston S. Churchill
#62. John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
Russell Banks
#63. The best way to support the troops is to not send them off to die in the first place. And the second best way to support them only to send them off to die when you absolutely have to. And the only way to know that you've done that is to talk about it, debate it, examine it, and make damn sure.
Barry Lyga
#64. Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder, and a foolish incursion by the Red Army, which helped to produce the ultra-nationalist military dictatorship of General Pilsudski.
Tariq Ali
#65. Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.
Max McKeown
#66. For the first time a British force had met, held and decisively defeated a major Japanese attack, and followed this up by driving the enemy out of the strongest possible natural positions.
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim
#67. The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Huey P. Newton
#68. The cable is evidence of a widespread US policy during the occupation of shooting first and asking questions later, as well as detaining anyone and everyone "suspected" of having any links to attacks on US forces.
Dahr Jamail
#69. Those who would wage war, should first eliminate all domestic enemies before proceeding to attack the external foe.
Sun Tzu
#70. I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
Cary Fukunaga
#71. The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
Chris Cleave
#72. 'Into the Blizzard' follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.
Michael Winter
#73. England Their England by AG Macdonell which was written in the thirties and is about a young Scotsman who's got shell shocked during the First World War... I love it.
Ian Hislop
#75. In a war, the first casualty is human dignity.
Paulo Coelho
#76. Most Americans are unaware that Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to go to war against radical Islam. Jefferson was very concerned with Islam's war-like doctrine and its inability to separate mosque and state.
Brad Thor
#77. If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.
Christian Lacroix
#78. Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.
Charles Lamb
#79. Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.
Harold E. Varmus
#80. Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.
Peter Schuyler
#81. The first time I ever saw people of any color was when D-Day left from my hometown in England, to go and free Europe from the war. And there was every color you could imagine, and I'd not seen that in England.
Richard Dawson
#82. We were taught that the French were our archenemies, that the Italians were traitors, that Austria had lost the First World War only because of a "stab in the back" - but I must tell you, we were never sure who had done the stabbing.
Edith Hahn Beer
#83. We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.
Emma Goldman
#84. Humans have precious few instincts, but that's because we don't listen to them. We let logic and knowledge get in the way. My dad always said that when instincts are at war with something society has taught you, listen to your instincts first and ask questions later.
Elizabeth Norris
#85. He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force.
Christopher Fowler
#86. This fearful grief has grown familiar to me since I first felt it at the start of World War II, but at each of its returns it is worse. Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder. I
Wendell Berry
#87. I'd never felt anything quite like it. For the first time in my life, everything was as it should be. Because the opposite of war ... is fucking.
Brian K. Vaughan
#88. The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated ...
Michel Foucault
#90. The first requirement of war: allies must not kill each other.
Deborah Harkness
#91. I've had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return.
Billy Bragg
#92. What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other's throats so they don't have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.
George Friedman
#93. In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke.
Max Heindel
#94. Shina is the Japanese appellation for China most commonly used during the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II the name for China reverted to chugoku (Middle Kingdom), a common name from before the Meiji Restoration (1868).4
Stefan Tanaka
#95. Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.
Charles Krauthammer
#96. The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.
Paul Johnson
#97. At the first rumors of war, timid investors in various government stock, being panic-stricken, sell out, to their loss and the gamblers' gain.
Randal Cremer
#98. Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance.
Galeazzo Ciano
#99. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
Paddy Chayefsky
#100. The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
Jill Lepore
