Quotes About World War I

#1. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.

Rodney Stark

#2. The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.

Rick Atkinson

#3. Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I had a great dislike of people who themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line.

C.S. Lewis

#4. The effect of AIDS was like a war in a minute country. Like, in World War I, a whole generation of Englishmen died all at once. And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years.

Fran Lebowitz

#5. I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

Celine Buckens

#6. Viewed as drama, World War I is somewhat disappointing.

D.W. Griffith

#7. There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far.

Dick Durbin

#8. For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

#9. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.

Jonah Goldberg

#10. After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

Charles Duhigg

#11. My father was an immigrant who literally walked across Europe to get out of Russia. He fought in World War I. He was wounded in action. My father was a great success even though he never had money. He was a very determined man, a great role model.

Arlen Specter

#12. I wonder if they were aware of the power of complimentary alcohol during World War I.

Pawan Mishra

#13. It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever.

Kevin Kwan

#14. If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.]

Ernest Rutherford

#15. After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

C.L.R. James

#16. Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war.

Monica Crowley

#17. I reckon that the Bailey Bridge and the bulldozer were the greatest advances in military engineering in the years between World War I and World War II.

Christopher Vokes

#18. Canada entered World War I as a colony and came out a nation ...

Bruce Hutchison

#19. We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.

Daniel Yergin

#20. Serbia will neither allow a revision of history, nor will it forget who are the main culprits in World War I.

Ivica Dacic

#21. The Lebanese government has officially recognized the Armenian genocide, but nowhere is there any official memorial to the victims of the World War I famine.

Louis Farshee

#22. Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.

P. J. O'Rourke

#23. It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.

Learned Hand

#24. Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

Godfrey Hounsfield

#25. History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

Frank Gaffney

#26. Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

Amity Shlaes

#27. Was U.S. entry into World War I such an act of genius that criticizing it is necessarily perverse?

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#28. There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

Dennis Prager

#29. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.

Tom Wolfe

#30. John Glenn's father, known as Herschel, was mostly deaf from injuries in World War I. To help out at home, young Glenn sold rhubarb all over town from the family garden.

Bill Dedman

#31. I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Doris Lessing

#32. Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn't packed so many troops into trenches?

Steven Pinker

#33. You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.

James Cagney

#34. The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.

Ruth Duccini

#35. What was that World War I saying, "Trust the Lord and pass the ammo"? For me, trust the doctors and the Lord and pass the Velcade, Revlimid, dexamethasone.

Tom Brokaw

#36. I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

Terence Winter

#37. No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#38. The D-Day moniker wasn't invented for the Allied invasion. The same name had been attached to the date of every planned offensive of World War II. It was first coined during World War I, at the U.S. attack at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in France in 1918.

Douglas Brinkley

#39. On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.

Eliot Engel

#40. Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.

Carl Sagan

#41. America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.

Sam Kean

#42. Living with my grandmother in Bath, I sort of thought I was living in the 19th century. My grandmother was someone who, in a way, was rather defiantly trying to live a pre-World War I existence.

Charles Palliser

#43. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.

Noam Chomsky

#44. I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.

James Rosenquist

#45. By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape's sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 - Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.

Jane Leavy

#46. The two sides that fought in World War I lived in the same century but in different places. The same is true for World War II. In World War III, both sides are almost everywhere, but they live in different centuries.

Haim Harari

#47. My father fought in World War I and single-handedly destroyed the Germans' line of communication. He ate their pigeon.

Frank Carson

#48. I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.

Abbey Lincoln

#49. The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.

Pete Hamill

#50. I was born in Russia in 1901 of Jewish parents and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father, who left Russia for the United States before World War I.

Simon Kuznets

#51. I was brought in touch with developing post World War I ideas in Europe.

Frank Scott

#52. More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

David Frum

#53. I made a French film called 'Merry Christmas' which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

Diane Kruger

#54. After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.'

Dave Brubeck

#55. 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

#56. Some smart alecs of those days after World War I used to say: The French fought for liberty, the British fought to control the seas, but the Americans fought for souvenirs.

Harry Truman

#57. World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.

Richard Holbrooke

#58. We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.

Philip Zaleski

#59. World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

Herman Kahn

#60. The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can - we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world - we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?

Dexter Filkins

#61. I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

Norman Schwarzkopf

#62. It was the same in World War I, when Woodrow Wilson, also a tool of the Jews, maneuvered it into the war.

Julius Streicher

#63. My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.

Marv Levy

#64. After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance.

Gilbert King

#65. World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

Ernest Hemingway,

#66. During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

Erik Larson

#67. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Eric Schmidt

#68. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Sebastian Junger

#69. My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.

Lisa Papademetriou

#70. We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that.

Donna Tartt

#71. Ever since World War I, superior force is no longer measured in terms of men or horses, but in the means to wreak destruction.

Saul David

#72. In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

Yoko Ono

#73. 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

#74. The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.

Peggy Noonan

#75. More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Aaron Huey

#76. I think I'm just someone that just tries to get by. I'm kind of - if it was during the Second World War, I'd be a black marketeer, I think.

Craig Ferguson

#77. For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

Lemony Snicket

#78. With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

David McCullough

#79. During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

Georg Solti

#80. So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

Robert Walser

#81. As a privileged survivor of the First World War, I hope I may be allowed to interject here a deeply felt tribute to those who were not fortunate enough to succeed, but who shared the signal honor of trying to the last to salvage peace.

Rene Cassin

#82. Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.

Henry Kissinger

#83. Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I,

Clive James

#84. My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

Douglass North

#85. After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

Leon Panetta

#86. My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

Walter Kohn

#87. When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

George McGovern

#88. I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

Walter Kohn

#89. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .

George Packer

#90. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#91. The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.

Ishmael Reed

#92. We can have a World War, I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have a World Party.

Vanna Bonta

#93. My parents were not born in Vienna, but they had spent much of their lives there, having each come to the city at the beginning of World War I when they were still very young.

Eric Kandel

#94. My daddy was a World War I pilot, and I just wanted to be able to fly like he did.

Forrest Bird

#95. The lights are going out all over Europe; We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. - SIR EDWARD GREY, ON WORLD WAR I

Kristin Hannah

#96. the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.

David Graeber

#97. Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history - a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world - from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Ayn Rand

#98. I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I.

Eric Kandel

#99. Ferguson also takes a swipe at the conventional wisdom surrounding aspects of World War I. "The key to the Allies' victory was not an improvement in their ability to kill the enemy," Ferguson argues, "but rather a sudden increase in the willingness of German soldiers to surrender."5

Luke Williams

#100. As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Lester B. Pearson