First World War Quotes - Page 3

• My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.

  Elliott Carter

  War, Important, World

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• Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

  Pat Barker

  War, World, Firsts

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• Psychiatrists the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.

  J. G. Ballard

  War, World, Firsts

  "The Lure of the Madding Crowd". The Independent on Sunday, 1991.

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• We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.

  Hans Fritzsche

  War, People, Hatred

  "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately, 2004.

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• You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

  Jeremy Hardy

  Mother, War, Father

  "The News Quiz". BBC Radio 4, October 1998.

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• Louis B. Mayer is one of those with a claim to posessing the equation... he began to buy up nickelodeon arcades in the years before the First World War in and around Boston. He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light... the appeal of the movies is beyond the sensible, rational or the hard-working. Going into the dark, afte centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity.

  Edward Jay Epstein

  War, Hard Work, Dark

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• We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  War, Fighting, Reality

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• The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

  Chris Bohjalian

  War, Reality, America

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• The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

  Laurie R. King

  War, Different, World

  "PW Talks with Laurie R. King". Interview with Robert C. Hahn, www.publishersweekly.com. February 18, 2002.

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• ... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

  Gertrude Stein

  War, History, Done

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.84, Random House

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• Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts

  Geoffrey Perret

  Beach, War, Men

  Geoffrey Perret (1982). “America in the twenties: a history”, Simon & Schuster

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

  Whittaker Chambers

  War, Fruit, Firsts

  Whittaker Chambers (2014). “Witness”, p.7, Regnery Publishing

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• Maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager.

  David Nicholls

  War, Drinking, Sadness

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• During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  War, Hair, Soldier

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• 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.

  Vladimir Putin

  War, Believe, Thinking

  "Putin Q&A". "TIME" Interview, content.time.com. 2007.

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• There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war'... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.

  Ernst Haeckel

  War, Character, Doubt

  Indianapolis Star, 20 Sept. 1914.

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• It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

  J. Maarten Troost

  War, College, Tea

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• I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel.

  David Icke

  Business, War, Believe

  "And the Truth Shall Set You Free". Book by David Icke, 1995.

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• 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.

  Emily Greene Balch

  War, Europe, East

  Emily Greene Balch (1972). “Beyond Nationalism: The Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch”, New York : Twayne Publishers

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• A preacher was operated on for a hernia. As this was about the time of the first world war he was given ether. As he was coming out of the anesthetic a fire broke out in the building next door. As the flames began to show through the hospital windows the nurse pulled the shades down. She didn't want the preacher to think his operation had been a failure.

  Art Linkletter

  Time, War, Failure

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• As a privileged survivor of the First World War, I hope I may be allowed to interject here a deeply felt tribute to those who were not fortunate enough to succeed, but who shared the signal honor of trying to the last to salvage peace.

  Rene Cassin

  War, Honor, Trying

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• I think our support for the EEC has been very half-hearted. You really cannot join any group of nations and spend all your time criticising it. The EEC is free Europe getting together. Had we had some vision like that after the first world war , we might never had the second ... my son does not have to go and fight as his father had to fight. Surely that is the most valuable thing of all, the reason for keeping Europe together.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Father, War, Fighting

  "In her own words" by Julian Glover, www.theguardian.com. March 22, 2002.

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• It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Adventure, Media

  Noam Chomsky (2011). “Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda”, p.30, Seven Stories Press

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• My father was in the First World War.

  Doris Lessing

  Father, War, World

  Doris Lessing (2003). “A Home for the Highland Cattle and the Antheap”, p.142, Broadview Press

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