World War One Quotes

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.

God for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.

There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.

I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong...not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.

The pioneer labor historian John Commons was not wrong when he wrote around World War One that exploiting and deepening such tensions as outpacing scientific management among U.S. innovations where bossing was concerned. Amidst the general miseries of proletarianization, workers also learned that one source of meager benefits and protections could lie in claiming a white skin.

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day...What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know.

It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.

World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war.

The old wars were decided by their episodes rather than by their tendencies. In this war, the tendencies are far more important than the episodes.

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.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

My only consolation for the failure of the Dardanelles was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war, and that therefore He had interfered with a project that would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion.

In the time of my parents, before World War One, most people who came to New Zealand from Europe were the more enterprising people; the people who were stronger mentally. It takes a certain amount of imagination to make a life on the other side of the world, the same imagination it takes to climb the tallest mountain.

How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.

...every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

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?

I cannot but think we have much to be thankful for, and more still to hope for in the future.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

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.

We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

Ten thousand officers and men named Smith died in the First World War. One thousand four hundred Campbells died, six thousand Joneses, and one thousand Murphys. Smith, Campbell, Jones and Murphy: the names of the United Kingdom, whose presence in regiments from all four countries speaks of the ebb and flow of peoples within these islands, of a common sacrifice, and a shared agony that burned in so many million hearts down the decades.

Wars always evolve over time, don't they? Iraq/Afghanistan is different than Vietnam, and Vietnam was different than Korea, and Korea was different than World War One, and so on. Some things remain the same, of course - one side fighting another over ideology or a patch of ground - but there are some aspects of combat life which differ radically than their predecessors.

The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below

In Flanders fields the poppies blow.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard among the guns below.

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.