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. The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

Nick Harkaway

#3. 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

#4. I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.

Robyn Davidson

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

Jeremy Hardy

#11. Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

Pat Barker

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.

Whittaker Chambers

#15. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War.

Tom Wolfe

#16. No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.

Saul David

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics.

Theodore Schultz

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. We didn't call it the First World War when it was happening.

Anita Diamant

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

Michael Gove

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. '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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. The First World War began because one man was shot. The Second World War began because of a mad German dictator. Who knows how a third could start. There are also people who think that the war has been going for a long time.

Ronald Lauder

#51. The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Adam Hochschild

#52. Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

A.J.P. Taylor

#53. English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War.

Kurt Vonnegut

#54. 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

#55. As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.

Adam Hochschild

#56. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Kurt Vonnegut

#57. 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

#58. On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.

Lyn Macdonald

#59. After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.

John Boyd Orr

#60. The French suffered such catastrophic losses in the First World War. It really was the end of them as a great world power, although they, quote, 'won.'

Edward Herrmann

#61. In those days, before the First World War, young women did not use makeup. Anna was free of lipstick, and her gold hair was rolled in great coils over her ears.

Daphne Du Maurier

#62. I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the First World War, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvelous playground for his five children.

Godfrey Hounsfield

#63. I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

Antonio Tabucchi

#64. The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

Chris Bohjalian

#65. The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

James Buchan

#66. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.

Doris Lessing

#67. My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War.

Clint Eastwood

#68. What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

George Grosz

#69. Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War ...

J.G. Ballard

#70. We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.

Hans Fritzsche

#71. Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts

Geoffrey Perret

#72. The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

Laurie R. King

#73. Fox hunting, there's big fox hunting thing, there's arguments in Britain about fox hunting. And they go around. They obviously hunt foxes because the foxes, they attack chickens. And posh people have an alliance with chickens just like in the First World War.

Eddie Izzard

#74. My father was in the First World War.

Doris Lessing

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.

Dave Brubeck

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

Muriel Rukeyser

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Emmanuel Jal

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. If I were the first of May, I should be ashamed of myself.

Winston Churchill

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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