Top 100 The First World War Quotes
#1. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#2. 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
#3. First of all, I want you to know that I believed in the cause for which I died. No war is won without sacrifice.
Elizabeth Berg
#4. I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.
David Mixner
#5. 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 Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war.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
#6. We're at war.
On the verge of an apocalypse filled with monsters and torture in a nightmare world.
And I'm standing here, a moonstruck teenager pining for an enemy soldier. What am I, crazy?
This time, I'm the first to turn away.
Susan Ee
#7. 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
#8. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#9. The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
Nick Harkaway
#10. 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
#11. I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
Dave Brubeck
#12. 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
#13. No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops.
John J. Pershing
#14. I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.
Robyn Davidson
#15. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#16. 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
#17. There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.
Douglas Hurd
#18. We know the story of the Deluge from the Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it is the same today.
Wilm Hosenfeld
#19. When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.
Trevor Nunn
#20. Our generation was born during the turmoil following the First World War. That war marked the dividing line - at least for the Western World - between the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.
Robert Kennedy
#21. with the centenary of 1914 rapidly approaching it is high time to stop regarding the first world war as current affairs and douglas haig as our contemporary
Gary Sheffield
#22. I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
Muriel Rukeyser
#23. When he came he first covered me with his revolver', Christine write in her official report, but it was not long before Waem put the gun down on the table between them.
Clare Mulley
#24. 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
#25. You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.
Jeremy Hardy
#26. I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty, nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge.
-the girl who played go
Shan Sa
#27. Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.
Pat Barker
#28. The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.
Emmanuel Jal
#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. 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
#31. School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
Antony Beevor
#32. In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.
Bill Bryson
#33. The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
Whittaker Chambers
#35. 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
#36. This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
Erich Maria Remarque
#37. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War.
Tom Wolfe
#38. No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.
Saul David
#39. The Garden of Eden was somewhere in present-day Iraq. The turmoil and war [we are witnessing] in that part of the world ... is occurring in the land where God established the first perfect civilization.
Billy Graham
#40. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#41. 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
#42. IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.
Stefan Zweig
#43. Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed.
Richard Engel
#44. Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.
Christian De Duve
#45. Is it more important for you to know what happened in the First World War or to memorize other significant dates in history, or is it more important to learn the strategies they used for optimum leadership, success and joyful living?
Don't you think schools need to teach the latter?
Maddy Malhotra
#46. This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
Adolf Hitler
#47. I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.
Ernst Zundel
#48. The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.
Douglas Hurd
#49. It is a myth that higher taxes lead to less demand and slower growth. In the first three decades after World War II, US top tax rates on the wealthy were never below 70 percent.
Robert Reich
#50. Two simple ways to win a war against the world:
First, find the faults within;
Second, there is no war.
Kunal Narayan Uniyal
#51. My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.
Elliott Carter
#52. Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.
Michael Robotham
#53. Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle
before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime ... exempt[ion] ... from responsibility for what you do thereafter.
Thomas Sowell
#54. Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II.
Eisaku Sato
#55. For the Marines, it validated their claim of "first to fight." They were the first Allied ground force to take the offensive against Axis forces in World War II, a point they still take pride in today.
Tom Clancy
#56. Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second. It's what happens when you live through things you shouldn't have been able to live through and can't reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.
Diana Gabaldon
#57. Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.
Richard C. Armitage
#58. 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
#59. What if making peace with our warring hearts - peace within - is the first step to world peace?
Jared Brock
#60. The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics.
Theodore Schultz
#61. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.
Colin Ward
#62. I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.
Nicholson Baker
#63. I have learned from first hand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world, it turns our young into soulless killers and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the 'art' of killing.
Kevin Benderman
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. We didn't call it the First World War when it was happening.
Anita Diamant
#67. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
John Hersey
#68. There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts.
John Kasich
#69. It was through the Second World War that most of us suddenlyappreciated for the first time the power of man's concentrated efforts to understand and control the forces of nature.We were appalled by what we saw.
Vannevar Bush
#70. The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
#71. In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
Laura Wade
#72. 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
#73. We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#74. The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.
William Carlos Williams
#75. The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.
Michael Gove
#76. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#77. Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.
Karl Marlantes
#78. 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
#79. Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, 'Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.'
Woody Harrelson
#80. During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadershipin industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace?
Mary Barnett Gilson
#81. 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
#82. The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions - but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock.
Edmond Taylor
#83. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world.
G.K. Chesterton
#84. Because," I said, "the japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups - after we'd done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.
John Podhoretz
#86. In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.
Erich Fromm
#87. When I was young, a child never asked questions of his elders," Claire Deverill said.
"Was that before or after the First World War?" Matt asked.
Anthony Horowitz
#88. '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
#89. 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
#90. There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.
Ernst Haeckel
#91. 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
#92. In 1957, which is now 57 years ago, my grandfather and then-Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi welcomed Prime Minister Menzies as the first Australian Prime Minister to visit Japan after World War II and drove the conclusion of the Japan-Australia Agreement on Commerce.
Shinzo Abe
#93. 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
#94. I am old enough to remember what it was like when the theories of Freud first escaped from the study and the clinic, and the great game of Hunt-the Complex began, to the entertainment and alarm of a war-shattered and disillusioned world.
Mary Butts
#95. 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
#96. First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#97. The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.
Emily Greene Balch
#98. 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
#99. In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.
Niall Ferguson
#100. 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
