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 a 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

“Here the fates of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.”
― Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

“We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying.”
― Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I do not attach too much attention to words. I enlisted, and as several times already in my life, I was prepared to follow the consequences of my actions. But I did not realize that the Legion would make me drink this chalice to the dregs and that these dregs would make me drunk, and that by taking a cynical pleasure in discrediting and debasing myself, I would end up by breaking free of everything to conquer my liberty as a man. To be. To be a man. And discover solitude.
That is what I owe to the Legion, and to the old lascars of Africa, soldiers NCOs, officers, who came to lead us and mix with us as comrades, these desperadoes, these survivors of God knows what colonial epics, but who were all men, all.
And that made it well worth the risk of death to meet these damned souls, who smelled of the galleys and were covered with tattoos. None of them ever let us down, and each one was willing to sacrifice himself, for nothing, for kudos, because he was drunk, for a challenge, for a laugh, to stick it to someone by God.
They were tough and their discipline was of iron. These were professionals. And the profession of a man of war is an abominable thing and leaves scars, like poetry. You have it or you don’t. One cannot cheat because nothing wears out the soul more and stigmatizes the face (and secretly the heart) of man and is more vain than to kill, and to begin again.”
― Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force

“Of all the history in the world the story of the First World War - also known as the Great War - is perhaps the most horrible. It's a story of what happens when machines go to war and human beings get in the way.”
― Terry Deary, The Frightful First World War

“It was, of course, precisely this flippant attitude, one Lawrence seemed determined to flaunt both in his correspondence and in person, that so incensed his military superiors.

But his defiance of soldierly protocol also underscored a deeper truth: Lawrence was fundamentally not of them, and was becoming less so all the time.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“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

“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...

“Straight and narrow is the way," he said.

"Very narrow, seemingly.”
― Winifred Boggs, Sally on the Rocks

“When did Europeans come to believe that they actually descended from savages? The answer would seem to be during World War I.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins