First World War Quotes

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

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

The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions – but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock.

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.

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.

Mehmet Ertegun died in 1944. President Roosevelt sent his body back to Turkey on the U.S.S. Missouri. Mehmet Ertegun and President Roosevelt had had a cordial relationship, and, indeed, Mehmet Ertegun may have helped insure that Turkey did not ally itself with Germany, as it had in 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.

Today people can see and protest all the different interests that want war to happen, the people it financially benefits. The First World War wasn’t fought for that reason. The Second World War wasn’t fought for that reason. Your entire country and way of life could be overtaken.

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 automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.’

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

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

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