Top 75 First World Quotes

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.

Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

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.

I think we are living in selfish times. I’m the first one to say that I’m the most selfish. We live in the so-called ‘first world,’ and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.

Our generation was born during the turmoil following the First World War. That war marked the dividing line – at least for the Western World – between the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.

I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the First World War, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvelous playground for his five children.

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.

Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it’s an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem.

I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.

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.

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries’ failure to advance.

Some anthems are great for sports. You’ve got the Russian national anthem… ‘O Canada,’ how wonderful is that for hockey… but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I saw the Italians play four times, and they won all four times – they won the championship.

They say the first World Series is the one you remember most. No, no no. I guarantee you don’t remember that one because the fantasy world you always dreamed about is suddenly real.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.

My father was in the First World War.

I made my first World Championships team at 12.

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.

It would be a dream to go to my first World Cup.

India is still searching for its first World Cup title. Australia and England have shown they are able to bounce back from disappointment.

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.

If you go back and look at WWE Magazine, they asked me when I was going to win my first world championship and I told them WrestleMania XXVI, so I was only a couple days off.

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

The first one is your first World Cup, so you go into it with a lot of pressure, trying to take it all in, but you are just so focused.

The best goal I have scored for the national team would be during the 2002 World Cup against Portugal. It was my first World Cup and my first goal in the World Cup. It was like a dream, and that’s why it was so memorable.

I remember my first World Championships. I got zero turns, and I got turned multiple times, and I was still a World Champion.

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.

Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, ‘Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.’

The first World Cup I followed was Sweden 1958. I watched the games on TV. Brazil won that World Cup by defeating Sweden 5-2 in the Final and Pele scored twice.

The first World Cup I remember was in the 1950 when I was 9 or 10 years old. My father was a soccer player, and there was a big party, and when Brazil lost to Uruguay, I saw my father crying.

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.

Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there’s something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think – I believe – it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component.

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

I’ve seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I’ve seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.

As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.

I became number one just after the World Championships in India. I was very young then, and I remember it was just a great feeling, my first World Championship.

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and ’80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.

The world’s urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.

The Yankees won the pennant, we went on to the World Series, 41 years after that in the city of Toronto. The great city of Toronto, and all the provinces in Canada, everybody reached out and they were excited because we won the first World Series ever, across the border.

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

Athens is a great place for me. It is my second home. It’s where I won my first world championship medal, it’s where I set my world record.

Until the late 1950s Britain’s leaders were slow to appreciate the social and economic value of motorways. The first stretch of German Autobahn had opened before the first world war, as did the first highway in the U.S. Other countries followed suit in the inter-war years.

As an American I wanted to explore… why are we the only first world country that still has capital punishment? Is it because we’re too afraid to really examine the system, or is it because we really truly believe that this is the best way to deter future crime?

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.

‘Into the Blizzard’ follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism ‘inevitably’ caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

When I won the first world title in 2011 I was practising six, seven or even more hours a day.

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.