Top 100 Quotes About World War One
#1. World War One is an important part of Ireland's multi-layered history during which tens of thousands Irish people lost their lives.
Martin McGuinness
#2. Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.
Yuval Noah Harari
#3. My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.
Christopher Morley
#4. In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jan Karon
#5. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is ... is it not yet enough?
C.S. Lewis
#6. This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob.
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. If you go to Wikipedia and you look at the Tour de France, there's this huge block in World War One with no winners, and there's another block in World War Two. And then it seems like there's another world war.
Lance Armstrong
#8. World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most.
Frederick Lenz
#10. I crawled in a spirit-haunted place
Made wild by souls that moan and mourn;
And Death leered by with mangled face -
Ah God! I prayed, I prayed for dawn.
Arthur Newberry 1893- Choyce
#11. 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
#12. A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson's vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.
Robert Dallek
#13. There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.
Joseph Rotblat
#14. 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
#15. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
Catherynne M Valente
#16. By interviewing at least one veteran, you can preserve memories that otherwise might be lost. My uncle was a downed fighter pilot and P.O.W. in World War II, and I am looking forward to recording his story for inclusion in the project.
Spencer Bachus
#17. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
Jon Meacham
#18. Do you guys ever think about how Hitler has affected the whole world? That just one man did all this? I mean, what if he had been a good man, instead?
Elizabeth Berg
#19. In a world of prophecy and war, where so much of my life followed a path laid out by duty and destiny,Tristan had enough strength to give me what no one else could. The one precious thing I needed the most. A choice.
Emma Raveling
#20. World War II has always been of great interest to me. I've known for decades that it was just one more war the politicians suckered us into.
Harry Browne
#21. Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.
John Berger
#22. I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Terry Teachout
#23. If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.
Sylvia Plath
#24. The belief in the inevitability of war is a self-fulfilling prophecy ... We need an alternative vision, to see the world as one, as interconnected.
Dennis Kucinich
#25. Like many of his fellow skyjackers, 49-year-old Arthur Gates Barkley was motivated by a complicated grievance against the federal government. In 1963, the World War II veteran had been fired as a truck driver for a bakery, after one of his supervisors accused him of harassment.
Brendan I. Koerner
#26. 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
#27. We can say that Japan is the only country that calls into question the outcome of the Second World War; no one else does.
Sergei Lavrov
#28. Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.
Bernard Cornwell
#29. The number one priority now is reducing the deficit that they [Labour] left us - the biggest deficit since the Second World War.
Iain Duncan Smith
#30. Likewise, Humanities Computing is the creative result of failure on the part of the manufacturers of early computers to produce operational machines in time to be used during the Second World War (or, one can argue, of failure on the part of the allied forces to make the war last longer).
Melissa Terras
#31. How could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history - not to mention the history of a world war - simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.
Robert M. Edsel
#32. That's the illusion of war. You think the world is over when your city comes down. But then you realize that you're just one city in a planet the size of ten million cities" -Nim
Lauren DeStefano
#33. The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
Jean Baudrillard
#34. As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
Dorothy Day
#35. I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
Burt Rutan
#36. There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup
Steen Langstrup
#37. No one ever mentioned it, but thousands of men welcomed World War II as a way to escape their humdrum lives rather than a chance to fight for God and country.
Art Buchwald
#38. The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.
Richard M. Nixon
#39. More than 55,000 men from Bomber Command lost their lives, of whom 38,000 were British. That's one in 10 of all the British servicemen lost in the Second World War. It beggars belief that there has not been some recognition for what they gave until now.
Carol Vorderman
#40. We've suffered a war, and one thing we know: Whenever our nation's faced war, whether it was in the 1980s when we were winning the Cold War or in the 1940s during World War II, the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war.
Ken Mehlman
#41. What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.
Jack Vance
#42. You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.
Junot Diaz
#43. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Patsy Asuncion
#44. I consider Ronald Reagan one of the greatest U.S. presidents since the World War II because of his staunch resistance to Communism and his efforts to defend human rights,
Yelena Bonner
#45. My gaze lands on the digital clock on my nightstand as it flicks to 12:01 AM. Hours spent in Orane's world, and one minute has passed in mine.
Erica Cameron
#46. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.
Mao Zedong
#47. Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.
Tariq Ramadan
#48. The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful.
Ken Follett
#49. The nuclear weapons on board just one of our Trident submarines contain eight times the firepower expended in all of World War II.
John Allen Paulos
#50. I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.
Larry Hagman
#51. 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
#52. Our goals are the same as those of the U.N.'s founders, who sought to replace a world at war with one where the rule of law would prevail, where human rights were honored, where development would blossom, where conflict would give way to freedom from violence.
Ronald Reagan
#53. Foresight is the cause of Europe's present wars. If one would take pains to forsee nothing, the whole world would be tranquil, and I do not believe that one would be worse off for not waging war.
Abbe Galiani
#54. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.
John Colville
#55. Fire," she whispered. "Wind. I see dark things and a dark war. I see my death coming for me, out of the spirit world. And I see you at the middle of it all. You're the beginning, the end of it. You're the one who can make the path go different ways."
"That's your vision? Iowa has less corn.
Jim Butcher
#56. Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
Philip Caputo
#57. As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.
Pierce Brown
#58. In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.
Philip Gourevitch
#59. Liberty may be of no more use Than stirring up the flame of civil wars; Then, by disorder fatal to the world, One wants no king, the other wants no equal.
Pierre Corneille
#60. One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.
Tom Hanks
#61. People hated and killed each other back then. Now even those who survived are dying, leaving this world one by one. Unless we find a way to forgive one another, none of us will ever be able to see each other again. (2007: 88)
Hwang Sok-yong
#62. It's not that he's choosing me, a girl he met less than a month ago
he's choosing a world in which no one has to die.
Amie Kaufman
#63. If one will fix his heart in such a way and assist the world and its people, he will have the devotion of the men who see and hear him.
Hojo Shigetoki
#64. I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.
Sanford I. Weill
#65. Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.
Philip Zaleski
#66. One of the elements in the film that really fascinated me was not to look at the world in bi-polar terms of us vs them or east vs west, which was a by-product of the Cold War.
Kathryn Bigelow
#67. One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn't learn about the outside world.
Greg Mortenson
#68. As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.
Herman Melville
#69. Did you know that at one time trick-or-treating was stopped? It's true. During World War II children were not allowed to trick or treat because there was a sugar shortage.
Linda Bozzo
#70. We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing. Our knowledge allows us to make use of all the forces already in existence, our art to interpret emotions already felt. One big war, an epidemic, and we collapse into ignorance and darkness, fit sons of chimpanzees.
Arshile Gorky
#71. Finally one evening somebody suggested Python (a great name for an untrustworthy impresario, I thought), someone else added Monty, which had connotations of our greatest World War II general, there was hysteria, and history was made. A
John Cleese
#73. Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
John Lennon
#74. The kosmos works by harmony of tensions, like lyre and bow. Good and evil are one. On the one hand God sees all as well, fair, and good; on the other hand a human being sees injustice here, justice there. Justice in our minds is strife. We cannot help but see war makes us as we are.
Heraclitus
#75. [I]t seems that the Cannibals of Europe are going to eat one another again. A war between Russia and Turkey is like the battle of the kite and snake; whichever destroys the other, leaves a destroyer the less for the world.
Thomas Jefferson
#76. One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.
Marc Forster
#77. Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
#78. No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time - the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.
Paul Tsongas
#79. There are only two forces that can withstand the force of the war's spirit when it seizes upon the world. The one is the force of an independently thinking, free, and articulate democracy. The other is the force of an instructed and enlightened public opinion.
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Baroness Pethick-Lawrence
#80. It (LSD) opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think of what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world if the politicians would take LSD. There wouldn't be any more war or poverty or famine.
Paul McCartney
#81. If the society that we're talking about is a society that starts wars all over the world, degrades indigenous cultures, is misogynistic in itself, if that's the society we're talking about, then it's not a bad thing if hip-hop did degrade that society.
KRS-One
#82. Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism ... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.
Richard Weikart
#83. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.
Timothy Snyder
#84. The face you wear in a battlefield should be a solemn one until the time when things are cleaned up and the real world drips its way in.
Terry Pratchett
#85. One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists' war, World War II was the physicists' war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians' war.
Philip J. Davis
#86. Think about a guy like Bob Mitchum, with his kind of chest gut not defining itself one way or the other. Was there anybody tougher? Lee Marvin was a marine sniper during the Second World War. They had this sense of themselves, and they had this product of being a man in a masculine way.
Joe Carnahan
#87. During World War I the Canadians were the shock troops. In many historical cases, Canadians have been very proficient at killing, and doing what we have to in order to survive. But no one wants to acknowledge that fact.
Joseph Boyden
#88. Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.
Andy Rooney
#89. I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.
Ben Barnes
#90. Every day there is a war inside your mind: A war between you and yourself! One side of you may defeat the other side of you! But you must know that your winning side might fail in the real world! Always be ready to give a chance immediately to your losing side, to your defeated idea!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.
Caroline Leech
#92. Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you
Elizabeth Berg
#93. The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.
U Thant
#94. Since the Gulf War, since the new World Order, America is now the number one arms dealer in the world.
Rob Walton
#95. There was a time when I didn't at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one's fellow man, or merely say evil of one's neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
Albert Camus
#96. Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don't have large minority groups.
Aleksander Kwasniewski
#97. There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.
Leonard Woolf
#98. I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
John Dufresne
#99. I had entered a world that no one with an evolved sense of joie de vivre would touch with a barge pole - it's called "Joining the Property Market" and it trumps war for stress!
Tyne O'Connell
#100. The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.
Michael Parenti
