World War One Quotes

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).”
― Otto von Bismarck

“...How many would like to get out of this world at the cheapest price?”
― Anton Sammut, Memories of Recurrent Echoes

“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, Home to Holly Springs

“Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
”
― Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems

“Morning comes. I go to my class. There sit the little ones with folded arms. In their eyes is still all the shy astonishment of the childish years. They look up at me so trustingly, so believingly - and suddenly I get a spasm over the heart.

Here I stand before you, one of the hundreds of thousands of bankrupt men in whom the war destroyed every belief and almost every strength. Here I stand before you, and see how much more alive, how much more rooted in life you are than I. Here I stand and must now be your teacher and guide. What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will be dried-up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses, all pressed mercilessly into the selfsame mold? Should I tell you that all the learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of God and humanity with gas, iron, explosive and fire? What should I teach you then, you little creatures who alone have remained unspotted by the terrible years?

What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string of a hand grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? Should I show you how to stab a man with a bayonet, how to fell him with a club, how to slaughter him with a spade? Should I demonstrate how best to aim a rifle at such an incomprehensible miracle as a breathing breast, a living heart? Should I explain to you what tetanus is, what a broken spine is, and what a shattered skull? Should I describe to you what brains look like when they scatter about? What crushed bones are like - and intestines when they pour out? Should I mimic how a man with a stomach wound will groan, how one with a lung wound gurgles and one with a head wound whistles? More I do not know. More I have not learned.

Should I take you the brown-and-green map there, move my finger across it and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets with which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of find phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?

I stand here before you, a polluted, a guilty man and can only implore you ever to remain as you are, never to suffer the bright light of your childhood to be misused as a blow flame of hate. About your brows still blows the breath of innocence. How then should I presume to teach you? Behind me, still pursuing, are the bloody years. - How then can I venture among you? Must I not first become a man again myself?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries.”
― Richard Aldington, DEATH OF HERO

“Yea! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved;
Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved;
Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned;
Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained;
Courage that suns
Only foolhardiness; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns.”
― Gilbert Frankau

“We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to the plougher and the ploughed.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“I had realized that it was not the courage and generosity of the dead which had brought about this chaos of disaster, but the failure of courage and generosity on the part of the survivors… Perhaps, after all, the best that we who were left could do was to refuse to forget, and to teach our successors what we remembered, in the hope that they, when their own day came, would have more power to change the state of the world than this bankrupt, shattered nation. If only, somehow, the nobility which in us had been turned toward destruction could be used in them for creation, if the courage which we had dedicated to war could be employed, by them, on behalf of peace, then the future might indeed see the redemption of man instead of his further descent into chaos.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Because we were duped, I tell you, duped as even yet we hardly realize; because we were misused, hideously misused. They told us it was for the Fatherland, and meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry. They told us it was for Honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes. They told us it was for the Nation, and meant the need for activity on the part of out-of-work generals!...

Can't you see? They stuffed out the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, and their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism, their stupidity, their greed of business, and then paraded it before us a shining ideal! And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can't you see man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it! Every shot that struck home, struck one of us! Can't you see? Then listen and I will bawl it into your ears. The youth of the world rose up in every land, believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other! Don't you see now? There is only one fight, the fight against the lie, the half-truth, compromise, against the old order. But we let ourselves be taken in by their phrases; and instead of fighting against them, we fought for them. We thought it was for the Future. It was against the Future. Our future is dead; for the youth is dead that carried it. We are merely the survivors the ruins. But the other is alive still - the fat, the full, the well content, that lies on, fatter and fuller, more contented than ever! And why? Because the dissatisfied, the eager, the storm troops have died for it. But think of it! A generation annihilated! A generation of hope, of faith, of will, of strength, ability, so hypnotised that they have shot down one another, though over the whole world they all had the same purpose!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“In his mind he was a spirit, feeling the radiant heat of the chalk of the trenches; cooling himself in the flicker-rippling Ancre. O, to be able to see it all again, a ghost world of gun-flashes at night. O to see it all, to grasp all of it, without violence, without pain; to share the marching and the singing of the living that were part of the great dream of life and death.”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“The struggle had been a people's war. The suffering and sacrifice had been immense. Those who survived the ordeal were left with the question of what it had all been for.”
― Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I

“I was once told in Sunday school that a church tower reaches up skywards because it is a promise of Heaven. Church towers are different in France. It was the first thing I noticed when I came here, when I changed my world of home for my world of war. In comparison the church towers at home seem almost squat, hiding themselves away in the folds of the fields. Here there are no folds in the fields, only wide open plains, scarcely a hill in sight. And instead of church towers they have spires that thrust themselves skywards like a child putting his hand up in class, longing to be noticed. But God, if there is one, notices nothing here. He has long since abandoned this place and all of us who live in it.”
― Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful

“The spacious philanthropy which [President Woodrow Wilson] exhaled upon Europe stopped quite sharply at the coasts of his own country.”
― Winston Churchill

“You see, when everything else is gone, there's always work. I don't think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.”
― Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

“Men as a rule do everything at women's expense, from their first day to the last. They come into the world at our expense, and at our expense they're able to do whatever work they please uninterrupted. We keep their homes pleasant fro them and provide them with all creature comforts, We satisfy both their loves and their lusts, and at our expense again they have the children they desire. When they's ill we nurse them; they recover at our expense; and when they die, we lay them out and see that they leave the world respectably.
If ever we can get anything out of them, or use them in any way that make things the least bit more even, it's not only our right to do it, it's a duty we owe to ourselves. "
[...] "really Virginia, to hear you talk one would think you'd suffered a dreadful injury at the hands of some man or other- and yet you're always telling me that all your best friends were men until the war came".
"So they were," said Virginia. "but all my friends were absolute exceptions to the general run of men".”
― Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

“Daphne tried to convey to him that the likelihood of degrees for women at Oxford was a matter for satisfaction, perhaps, but hardly for excitement or ratification. Women's accomplishments in the University had long been equal, if not superior, to men's; degrees were not a privilege, they were simply what women deserved - their due, their right. She became very animated as she argued on this topic.”
― Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

“They waited in position, bayonets fixed, on the morning of July 1st, and listened to the mines go, on schedule at 7.25 a.m. In the distant village of Fricourt, the church bell rang clamorously as the tower collapsed.

The weird sound unnerved the men as they waited in their trench, as if the clanging of the bell were the terrible gabble of their own mute fear. Then the whistle went, and they surged forward, over the top into a world of noise.

There was no logic that carried Perceval Lucas forth as he ran on those strong, lean legs of his; no discernible path that had taken him from his garden by the stream at Rackham Cottage to one of the bloodiest battles in human history, there on the upper reaches of the River Somme.

The following morning, his company entered the village square, and kicked away, underfoot, the stone fragments of saints. The church was a smoking stump, and they saw that its bell-tower had crushed two houses as it fell. Cows wandered the streets, mad and fevered with not having been milked.”
― Alison MacLeod

“On sekiz yaşında idik; dünyayı, hayatı sevmeye başlamıştık, sevdiğimiz bu şeylere kurşun sıkmak zorunda kaldık. Patlayan ilk mermiler kalbimize saplandı. Çalışma, çaba, ilerleme kapıları kapandı bize. Biz bunlara artık inanmıyoruz, biz harbe inanıyoruz.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Christmas: 1924

Peace upon earth! "was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.”
― Thomas Hardy

“When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?”
― Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin

“The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonising our our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Centre was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle Of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images.
Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.
They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.”
― John Vincent Palatine, The Little Drummer Boy

“Here there are no folds in the fields, only wide open plains, scarcely a hill in sight. And instead of church towers they have spires that thrust themselves skywards like a child putting his hand up in class, longing to be noticed. But God, if there is one, notices nothing here. He has long since abandoned this place and all of us who live in it.”
― Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful

“The ruins of Chief Azul's house can still be seen to the right as your enter the town of Sacaton from the north--a two story structure with the roof fallen in. In front, across the road to the south is a monument which was put up in memory of the first Indian killed in World War One who was a Pima Indian from our tribe.
[page 51, Progress]”
― George Webb, A Pima Remembers

“I cannot understand how this is to come about but come about it must. It seems boy that we move within the confines of our own consciousness, would that I could expand my gaze to become aware of all the activities of my own being.”
― Geoff Widders, Flight of the Shaman

“I had made my own calculations as the years had passed since boyhood, understanding the grim expectations of my sex. It was equally a relief and a surprise to have found myself spared by the giant tread of fate’s jackboot as it had marched towering above me, the monstrous, insensible colossus, leaving those born in my inglorious decade cowering in its path, relieved though somewhat ashamed on a bubble of untrammelled dirt. While all around us men slightly older, and mere months younger, were squashed face first, bones snapped, into the puddled trenches of its staggering tracks. Then, what an extraordinary gift from God, to see little Robert and those of his age spared too, supposing this war ended quickly and the next came late enough.”
― A.J.West, The Spirit Engineer

“No one stays young forever. And me? I lost my youth in the battlefield. If I have my way, I'll never leave this country again. Hell, I'll never leave the county. And if you think I'm the kind of man who'd leave Amelia, you never knew me at all.”
― Hope Larson, Salt Magic

“Onur...diye mırıldandı Jousselin. Manevi değerleri, hiç anlamı olmayan yerlere sokmak büyük bir yanılgıdır kanımca... Demek istediğim devletleri bölen ekonomik çatışmalara... Bu, her şeyi çığırından çıkarır, berbat eder, bütün gerçekçi uzlaşmaları dondurur. Bu, aslında ticaret şirketleri arasındaki rekabeti, duygu ve ideoloji çatışmaları ve din savaşları kılığına sokar.”
― Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault, Volume 2...

“Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars—if we jumped in and did the dirty job?”
― Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick