Somme Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

George Will

#3. I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.

Henry Williamson

#4. '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

#5. In fact, if anybody on the Somme battlefield is overdue to be treated with a little pathos it is not the attackers, with their threefold artillery superiority, total control of the air and copious reserves of of manpower, but rather the German defenders opposite.

Alexander Watson

#6. More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand!

Ken Follett

#7. I sometimes compare press officers to riflemen on the Somme
mowing down wave upon wave of distortion, taking out rank upon rank of supposition, deduction and gossip.

Bernard Ingham

#8. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

Robert Fisk

#9. Of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty rate was among the horses. Compared with the Somme or an evening in the Blitz, the Valley of Death was a piece of cake.

Simon Heffer

#10. A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

G.H. Hardy

#11. What motivates me is to be able to do what I love to do ... fight

Anderson Silva

#12. Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, in my opinion.

Eddie Trunk

#13. The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.

Giacomo Leopardi

#14. I find that when people laugh really hard, it's usually because they're connecting and identifying in a way that they hadn't considered. That's my payoff.

Louis C.K.

#15. If you say no to cruel factory farm practices, only then will the government say yes to change.

Jane Velez-Mitchell

#16. How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?

Michel De Montaigne

#17. The verses in the Bible are more than good teachings, they possess power.

Francis Chan

#18. Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

Simon Blackburn

#19. Tobias' body became a marble statue, and she knew she'd reached the darkness of his soul.

Monica Burns