Top 35 First World War Quotes

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

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.

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

Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Seventeen million people around the world lost their lives in the first world war, countless suffered and were marred for life.

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.

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.

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.

Hungary has a moral debt to the Jews that it helped send to death camps thirty years after the First World War.

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

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.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain’s wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

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

Mum told me stories about her time in the Women’s Royal Navy, and about her dad, who had died before I was born – he’d been sent to Australia as a child, then joined the Australian Army in the First World War and fought at Gallipoli.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.’

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.

I am fascinated by Omega’s history. Particularly the First World War stuff, when they made watches for the flying corps, and the NASA side of it.

You have to keep listening and thinking and being critical and self-critical. Remember General Nivelle, in the First World War, at Verdun? He said he had the solution and then destroyed the French Army until it mutinied.

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

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

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.

If ‘Sajjan Singh Rangroot’ showed seriousness through the First World War, ‘Carry On Jatta 2’ had a great dose of comedy.

A lot of my father’s family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.