Top 45 World War I Quotes

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, ‘New Museum,’ to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency.

History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

My father was an immigrant who literally walked across Europe to get out of Russia. He fought in World War I. He was wounded in action. My father was a great success even though he never had money. He was a very determined man, a great role model.

I did a production of ‘Journey’s End,’ an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, ‘You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.’

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.

The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars – all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.

I read everything that Tolkien wrote, and also read biographies of him. I was fascinated by his experiences in World War I, which includes the loss of life of some of his very, very close friends. I think he writes about that a lot in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

My schooling was disrupted by the shortage of labor during World War I. It meant foregoing high school. Then, late in 1921, I entered upon a short course in agriculture at South Dakota State College. I managed to enter college in 1924, and I was permitted to complete my college work in three years.

Gosh, I think faith is a wonderful thing. And I even think religion’s a wonderful thing. I know a lot of people want to say, ‘Religion’s the only reason that man has had any trouble at all,’ but you know what? World War I and World War II were not fought because of religious reasons.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States’ ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

America was probably Europe’s equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.

My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Regional interest rate differentials persisted until around the time of World War I and helped shape the attitudes of Americans living in western areas toward the nation’s financial system.

I started with the book ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.

John Glenn’s father, known as Herschel, was mostly deaf from injuries in World War I. To help out at home, young Glenn sold rhubarb all over town from the family garden.

I’ve said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were ‘German dogs.’ They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.

It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever.

After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

World War I was the deadliest conflict the world had ever known. Veterans Day originated from the American people recognizing that a heavy debt of gratitude was due to the veterans of that brutal conflict.

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

I was brought in touch with developing post World War I ideas in Europe.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Serbia will neither allow a revision of history, nor will it forget who are the main culprits in World War I.

I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.

I actually love history. I’ve devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They’re really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape’s sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 – Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.

By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility – a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: ‘The Great Loot.’

Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn’t take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies’ ability and will to make war.

What we know from World War I is that some of our troops had acute symptoms of exposure to chemicals, had bad health and died because of chemical exposure in World War I.

My daddy was a World War I pilot, and I just wanted to be able to fly like he did.

After every major conflict – World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union – what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

I’m a bit embarrassed about how little I know about the First World War. I didn’t even know that tanks were used in it.

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or ‘The Great War,’ as it was called until 1939.

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers – ‘Russian’ came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.

I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.

The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can – we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world – we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.