World War 1 Quotes

“Beyond Man's knowing truth lies another truth unconquered...”
― Anton Sammut, Memories of Recurrent Echoes

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”
― Jan Karon, Home to Holly Springs

“When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“Yea ! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved ;
Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;
Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;
Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ;
Courage that suns
Only foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns.”
― Gilbert Frankau

“No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops.”
― John J. Pershing

“In each succeeding war there is a tendency to proclaim as something new the principles under which it is conducted. Not only those who have never studied or experienced the realities of war, but also professional soldiers frequently fall into the error. But the principles of warfare as I learned them at West Point remain unchanged.”
― John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War

“On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.”
― Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man's Land

“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”
― Harry Patch

“There will always be another war, Gillia.” He allowed his cynicism to seep through. “Do you know why? Because there will always be bigots and cowards and power-mad devils in positions of omnipotence. Look around you. There has been war here since time began. It’s nature. Animals kill each other for survival, for territory… and for the taste of blood in their mouths. Man is no different.”
― V.S. Carnes

“...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end.
....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178)”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“There were thousands of young men, as padres at the front would testify, in whom belief in God was an unshakeable conviction, and who in danger, in bodily agony and in death found peace and consolation in their undimmed faith. There were thousands upon thousands again for whom religion had always been a matter of indifference, and to whom it remained so. But there were also those, not negligible in point of numbers, and far from negligible in point of intelligence, who quietly thought about it all, and found that the faith in which they had been brought up was not reconcilable with the horrors that were their daily bread. About the reality of them there was no doubt: to see your friend turned to tripe or a dish of brains before your eyes was actual, and they threw over the other not with indifference, but with the savage contempt of those who have been fooled. It was childish to talk of loving your enemies when you were going through hell yourself for the sake of maiming or killing them as profusely as possible. And what price Divine Protection for non-combatants? There was that padre (bloody fool) who ran out across a shell-swept area to administer the sacrament to a man who lay mortally wounded in front of a trench, and who was like to die before they could bring him in. A shell hit him directly as he ran: he vanished like a property in a conjuring trick, and one couldn't help laughing and was sick afterwards.”
― E.F. Benson, As We Are

“They lived in a world of destruction and fortuitous death. All was chance, and it was not even the Devil who threw the dice, for he was part of the fairy-tale and perished with it. It had hardly been worth while to pick a bone with it, for the only thing to quarrel with was one's own credulity in having ever believed a tale that broke down at so many points when put to the test. Year by year boys fresh from school joined in the dance of death, and sweltered in the reeking, stinking heat, when they should have been playing cricket or swimming in cool waters, and they got trench-fever and were gassed, and young limbs swift to run and ripe for love were gashed by bullets and sawn off in hospitals. The fate of the world rested on their shoulders: they were the bewildered scapegoats who were driven out into this desert of death, to expiate the criminal pride and folly of those who had been in charge of world-affairs while they were yet unbreeched. Save for rare moments of panic, they maintained a cheerful carelessness, a studied unconsciousness of the surrounding horror, for to think about it, to realize it and speak of it was to go mad. A few went mad, and with bandaged eyes awaited the volley they would never hear. The rest carried on, dumb and gallant, saying nothing, except in a few blurted words to a friend, of that smouldering focus of resentment and despair.”
― E.F. Benson, As We Are

“Most of us who were cooperatively bringing out the Masses were agreed upon that. Some channel of protest must be safeguarded for those who had not been stampeded into dumb obeisance to the world's war-makers.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“On sekiz yaşında idik; dünyayı, hayatı sevmeye başlamıştık, sevdiğimiz bu şeylere kurşun sıkmak zorunda kaldık. Patlayan ilk mermiler kalbimize saplandı. Çalışma, çaba, ilerleme kapıları kapandı bize. Biz bunlara artık inanmıyoruz, biz harbe inanıyoruz.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Have you news of my boy Jack? ”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!”
― Rudyard Kipling, Sea Warfare

“From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, more than anything else embody for us the horror of war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and wounded—we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“When I see them here, in their rooms, in their offices, about their occupations, I feel an irresistible attraction in it, I would like to be here too and forget the war; but also it repels me, it is so narrow, how can that fill a man’s life, he ought to smash it to bits; how can they do it, while out at the front the splinters are whining over the shell-holes and the star-shells go up, the wounded are carried back on waterproof sheets and comrades crouch in the trenches. — They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world. Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but no one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I look out of the window; – beyond the picture of the sunlit street appears a range of hills, distant and light; it changes to a clear day in autumn, and I sit by the fire with Kat and Albert and eat potatoes baked in their skins.

But I do not want to think of that, I sweep it away. The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Behind us lay rainy weeks—grey sky, grey fluid earth, grey dying. If we go out, the rain at once soaks through our overcoat and clothing;—and we remain wet all the time we are in the line. We never get dry. Those who will wear high boots tie sand bags round the tops so that the mud does not pour in so fast. The rifles are caked, the uniforms caked, everything is fluid and dissolved, the earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie yellow pools with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded, and survivors slowly sink down. The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, more than anything else embody for us the horror of war”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I had made my own calculations as the years had passed since boyhood, understanding the grim expectations of my sex. It was equally a relief and a surprise to have found myself spared by the giant tread of fate’s jackboot as it had marched towering above me, the monstrous, insensible colossus, leaving those born in my inglorious decade cowering in its path, relieved though somewhat ashamed on a bubble of untrammelled dirt. While all around us men slightly older, and mere months younger, were squashed face first, bones snapped, into the puddled trenches of its staggering tracks. Then, what an extraordinary gift from God, to see little Robert and those of his age spared too, supposing this war ended quickly and the next came late enough.”
― A.J.West, The Spirit Engineer

“Onur...diye mırıldandı Jousselin. Manevi değerleri, hiç anlamı olmayan yerlere sokmak büyük bir yanılgıdır kanımca... Demek istediğim devletleri bölen ekonomik çatışmalara... Bu, her şeyi çığırından çıkarır, berbat eder, bütün gerçekçi uzlaşmaları dondurur. Bu, aslında ticaret şirketleri arasındaki rekabeti, duygu ve ideoloji çatışmaları ve din savaşları kılığına sokar.”
― Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault, Volume 2...

“For three months after the United States declared war on Germany the Masses kept on assailing the jingoists, the profiteers, and the capitalists who caused the beating and deportation of strikers, the Post Office censorship, and other evils which had been loosed in the campaign to silence all critics of the war administration.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“Slacker had come into the language as a term of frequent use. Bundles of Hearst newspapers had been burned in Times Square because Hearst was slow in swinging to the Allied cause but in a few weeks he had swung, and American flags were printed all over his daily sheets. So-called pro-Germans were being tarred and feathered by mobs in the West. Frank Little of the I.W.W. executive board had been lynched by business men in Butte, Montana. And new and appalling tales of cruelty to conscientious objectors were coming out of the prisons where they were confined.”
― Art Young

“Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars—if we jumped in and did the dirty job?”
― Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick

“Consider the last war.
Austria (to Servia): Stop it, or I'll make you.
Russia (to Austria): Stop it, or I'll make you.
Germany (to Russia): Stop it, or I'll make you.
France (to Germany): Stop it, or I'll make you.
Germany (to France): Stop saying stop it, or I'll make you.
England (to Germany): Stop it, or I'll make you.
This reads like something from a comic opera, but it is exactly what happened.”
― A.A. Milne, HAPPY HALF-HOURS: Selected Writings of A. A. Milne

“A gray-clad giant closed with Donovan, and the sergeant, caught off balance, stumbled and fell, with the enemy on top, clutching the American's throat with one hand and trying to swing a clubbed Mauser pistol with the other. Rags leaped for the hand that held the pistol. As his teeth sank into the man’s wrist the pistol clattered to the ground. The grip on Donovan's throat relaxed. The sergeant shook the man from him, and after a few minutes of desperate fighting the Americans mopped up the nest.”
― Jack Rohan, Rags: The Dog Who Went to War