World War One Quotes

The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below

There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.

I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong…not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

I cannot but think we have much to be thankful for, and more still to hope for in the future.

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry…I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 – Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America…Everything else is swept away.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.

Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is… is it not yet enough?

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray…We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

In the time of my parents, before World War One, most people who came to New Zealand from Europe were the more enterprising people; the people who were stronger mentally. It takes a certain amount of imagination to make a life on the other side of the world, the same imagination it takes to climb the tallest mountain.