First World War Quotes - Page 2

• If you look at the First World War, the Kaiser was actually, actively buying a lot of the armaments from Britain! in the years, in the run-up to the First World War. And I mean, there was a connection there. He was, indeed, Queen Victoria's grandson. You know, they were all related, all these royal families.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  Running, Queens, War

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!

  Spike Milligan

  War, Mistake, Alive

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• The First World War created the Second World War because that was a war between three grandsons of Queen Victoria: The King of England, the Kaiser and the Tsar married Queen Victoria's granddaughter. And that triggered Communism in Russia and Fascism in Germany and led to the Second World War.

  Tony Benn

  War, Granddaughter, World

  Source: mattkennard.tumblr.com

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• 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

  War, Hunting, People

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• After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there's a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don't feel that we are in any great danger.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Running, War, Cutting

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. June 12, 2003.

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• I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties.

  Sylvia Plath

  War, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• I read "Women Heroes of World War I" and was absolutely astonished. When we imagine women serving in the First World War, mostly we think of Red Cross nurses, but here I was reading about women serving as front-line soldiers, women serving as war journalists . . . and women who worked undercover as spies.

  Kate Quinn

  War, Reading, Hero

  "Working for the Queen of Spies: Kate Quinn and Stephanie Dray Discuss 'The Alice Network'". Interview With Erin Kodicek, www.amazonbookreview.com. July 24, 2017.

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• There is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.

  George Friedman

  War, Technology, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  War, Average, America

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word".

  Quentin S. Crisp

  War, Past, World

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• After the First World War, it was, like, let's form the League of Nations, we have to learn to work together. It's the only way we're going to survive. And now it's like we're undoing these very fragile institutions that were built after the First and Second World Wars that were about nations working on a kind of global diplomacy for our mutual benefit. And we're undoing them at such rapid-fire pace.

  Zoe Leonard

  War, Mutual Benefit, Fire

  Interview with Molly Prentiss, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 13, 2016.

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• Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

  Jane Jacobs

  War, Ideas, People

  Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.

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• Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  War, Age, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  War, Challenges, Navy

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• Perhaps this is an area where every generation starts from scratch. Although the crisis of the First World War inaugurated an especially strong period of disillusion with regard to the optimism of the previous age, the pattern has repeated itself in many ways in more recent times, e.g., the loss of faith in politics as a means of advancing human well-being. And perhaps this also has to do with basic elements in growing up.

  George Pattison

  Strong, Growing Up, War

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• 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

  War, Iraq, Differences

  CNN-Facebook Republican Presidential Debate, cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com. December 16, 2015.

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• David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a 'born leader', declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had 'a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today'. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!

  Boris Johnson

  Country, War, Hero

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• 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

  War, England, Colorado

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  War, Men, Voice

  "Breakfast Of Champions". Book by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973.

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• 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

  War, Opportunity, Swings

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• Remember how the first world war broke out. It broke out as a result of the desire to redivide the world.

  Joseph Stalin

  War, Desire, World

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

  Adam Hochschild

  War, Our World, Way

  "WWI: The Battle That Split Europe, And Families". "All things considered" with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. April 30, 2011.

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• 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.

  Kevin Myers

  Country, Peace, War

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• 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

  Baby, Real, War

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.56, Open Road Media

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• 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

  War, World, Firsts

  George Grosz (1982). “The autobiography of George Grosz: a small yes and a big no”

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