World War I Quotes - Page 7

• I certainly felt I had an idea of World War II, and it's probably the idea that many people share: there was this insane aggressor, and there was really only one way to proceed in resisting him. What I didn't realize is that there were many voices belonging to reasonable, interesting, complicated people who had a different way of interpreting the possible responses to the Hitlerian menace.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Ideas, Voice

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• People would always say horror movies always thrive during times of war; that's just what people would say. And I don't know if they thrived during World War II or Vietnam, but I thought that's kind of strange, why would that happen. I don't know if people rearrange their priorities; in good times, they freak out and start pointing the fingers at video games and TV, but when horrible things are happening in the world, a horror movie just seems a little ridiculous.

  Rob Zombie

  War, Games, People

  "Rob Zombie Goes Six Feet Under with The Devil's Rejects". Interview with Movieweb, movieweb.com. July 20, 2005.

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• Some people are saying there's going to be a third World War. I hope not. I really think this is a time that people can start to mend things by negotiations, dealings. We know about dealings, don't we? We have brilliant lawyers. Why don't we have brilliant lawyers standing up and working for peace?

  Yoko Ono

  War, Thinking, People

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• I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Reading, Air

  "Zinn Speaks". Interview with Wajahat Ali, www.counterpunch.org. April 19, 2008.

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• Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Baby, Peace, War

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• All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, Mistake, Tables And Chairs

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.177, Random House

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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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• The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.

  Gertrude Stein

  Truth, War, Years

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.133, Random House

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• All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.

  Margaret Mead

  War, Age, Different

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• What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Hate, War, World

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• If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, Civilization, History

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• We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, Europe, History

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• Whatever may be the reason, whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, orwhether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete--however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.

  Neville Chamberlain

  Peace, War, Fighting

  Speech at Central Hall,Westminster, England, 4 Apr. 1940

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• While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolerable old burden of sex ignorance.

  Crystal Eastman

  Sex, War, Ignorance

  Crystal Eastman (1978). “Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• John Glenn's father, known as Herschel, was mostly deaf from injuries in World War I. To help out at home, young Glenn sold rhubarb all over town from the family garden.

  Bill Dedman

  Father, War, Home

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• Then down came the lid--the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Art, War, World

  1937 Blasting and Bombardiering, pt.5,'Toward an Art-Less Society'.

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• The financial interdependence of the world's banks is like the interlocking alliances that predated World War I.

  Dick Morris

  Wall, War, Alliances

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• History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
  A thousand and one remains a thousand,
  as though the one had never existed:
  an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
  ...
  emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
  nobody's place in line.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Running, War, Garden

  Wislawa Szymborska, “Hunger Camp At Jaslo”

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• Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

  Sandra Scarr

  Husband, War, Work

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• Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, People, London

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• I hope the World War II generation doesn't lose that quality that made them so appealing: their modesty, and the way they are always looking forward and seldom back.

  Tom Brokaw

  War, Quality, World

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• ... the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  War, Army, Opportunity

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• Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  War, Earthquakes, Suffering

  "Orphaned, Raped and Ignored" by Nicholas Kristof, www.nytimes.com. January 30, 2010.

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• I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.

  Simon Armitage

  War, Meditation, Ironic

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• When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.

  Chuck Klosterman

  War, Greatness, Doors

  Chuck Klosterman (2009). “Eating the Dinosaur”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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