Ww1 Quotes

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Our knowledge of life is limited to death”
― Enrich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
― Laurence Binyon

“It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.”
― James Connolly

“As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father's tactless comment to understand the full implications of Farouk's death. As he met her unblinking gaze he was reminded of one of Nefret's more vivid descriptions. 'When she's angry, her eyes look like polished steel balls.' That's done it, he thought. She's made up her mind to get David and me out of this if she has to take on every German and Turkish agent in the Middle East.”
― Elizabeth Peters, He Shall Thunder in the Sky

“Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“Emerson abandoned irony for blunt and passionate speech.
'This war has been a monumental blunder from the start! Britain is not solely responsible, but by God, gentlemen, she must share the blame, and she will pay a heavy price: the best of her young men, future scholars and scientists and statesmen, and ordinary, decent men who might have led ordinary, decent lives. And how will it end, when you tire of your game of soldiers? A few boundaries redrawn, a few transitory political advantages, in exchange for an entire continent laid waste and a million graves! What I do may be of minor importance in the total accumulation of knowledge, but at least I don't have blood on my hands.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Lord of the Silent

“I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.”
― John Biggins, Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire

“The old self must die. He had always known it, but had so seldom acted it. He felt strangely glad that he was at the front. It was the only life; the only death.”
― Henry Williamson, Love and the Loveless: A Soldier's Tale

“To The Warmongers

I'm back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.

Young faces bleared with blood
sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain

Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.

For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.

But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“Good-bye,' she said. On her lips it lost all the bitterness it had won through the ages of parting and bore instead all the sweetness of the old loves of all the women who had ever loved and prayed for the beloved.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“... we are feeble and spent, and nothing supports us but the knowledge that there are still feebler, still more spent, still more
helpless ones there who, with staring eyes, look upon us as gods that escape death many times”
― 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 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

“Time makes me be a soldier; but I know
That had I lived six hundred years ago,
I might have tried to build within my heart
A church like this, where I could dwell apart”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“In your gaze / show me the vanquished vigil of my days”
― Siegfried Sassoon

“He pushed another bag along the top,
Craning his body outward; then a flare
Gave one white glimpse of No Man's Land and wire;
And as he dropped his head the instant split
His startled life with lead, and all went out.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“Susan, I am determined that I will send my boy off tomorrow with a smile. He shall not carry away with him the remembrance of a weak mother who had not the courage to send him when he had the courage to go.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“We're in an absolutely different world. The only things that are the same are the stars—and they are never in their right places, somehow.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“After all it was not a hard thing to fight for a land that bore daughters like this.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“There were moments when waiting at home, in safety and comfort, seemed an unendurable thing.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“And then—but I suppose we'll be able to endure it somehow. To me, the strangest of all the strange things since 1914 is how we have all learned to accept things we never thought we could —to go on with life as a matter of course. [...] If one of them does not come back my heart will break—yet I go on and work and plan—yes, and even enjoy life by times. There are moments when we have real fun because, just for the moment, we don't think about things and then—we remember—and the remembering is worse than thinking of it all the time would have been.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“Can the spring really come this year?'
Then she laughed—such a dreadful little laugh, just as one might laugh in the face of death, I think, and said 'Observe my egotism. Because I, Gertrude Oliver, have lost a friend, it is incredible that the spring can come as usual. The spring does not fail because of the million agonies of others—but for mine—oh, can the universe go on?'
'Don't feel bitter with yourself, dear,' mother said gently. 'It is a very natural thing to feel as if things couldn't go on just the same when some great blow has changed the world for us. We all feel like that.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside

“- Tamam! Alman'la birlik olup savaşa girmişiz kardaşlar!
- Girelim ya, geç bile kaldık. Rezilliğe alıştık bi kez! Bir rüzgâr da budur, gelir geçer.
- Hemen geçmesin yahu! Balkan'ın öcünü Bulgar'dan alıverelim de sonra...
- Höst! Senin dünyadan haberin yok! Biz bu kez Bulgar'la birliğiz. 'Can yoldaşı', 'silah arkadaşı' diyelim de aklın yatsın!
-İşte buna şaştım! Gebe karıların karnını deşip, körpe çocukları süngüye takan, câmilere çanlar asan Bulgar gavuruyla, he mi?
- Enver Paşa, 'Önce Sırplıyı aradan çıkaralım da Bulgarların hesabı sonra görülür' diyesiymiş...
- Ne akıl yahu! Ulan aferin Enver Paşa! İngiliz'den Mısır'ı Yunan'dan da Girit'i alacak mıymış?
-Mısır, Girit kaç para? Rus'tan Kırım'ı Kafkasya'yı almadan almadan kılıcı kınına sokmak yok...
-Oh ağzını öpeyim. Gene ballar akıttın. Ama Alman erkekse, bize o zırhlı toplardan bir iki vermeli...
-Hey şaşkın, top ne demek! Herif bize iki gemi vermiş ki dünyada eşi yokmuş...
-Yalana bak!
- Vallah... Gemi vermeseydi, bizim bu savaşta işimiz neydi? Biz bu gemilerin hatırına girmekteyiz! Bunlar savaş patladığı sırada bize yakın bir denizdeymişler. İngiliz bunları sıkıştırmış! Bunlar kaçar, İngiliz'in donanması kovalar. Sonunda Alman gemileri bakmışlar ki kurtuluş yok, bizim Çanakkale Boğazı'na dayanmışlar da yol istemişler. Enver Paşa onlara yol vermiş, arkasını kovalayan İngiliz gemilerine de basmış gülleyi...
-Hele arslana hele! Hey ömrüne bereket! Öyleyse dur sen, ben işi anladım! Alman yeni toplardan bize gizliden vermiş ki bizimkiler İngiliz'i topa tutmuşlar, yoksa n'ağzımızaydı bacanak?
-Artık orasını bilmem. Gemiler şimdi bizde... İngiliz bize çok yalvarmış. Ben ettim, sen etme! Benim benim bu amansız sıramda düşmanıma arka çıkma!' diyerekten...
- Önce gerekti domuuuz! Ismarladığımız Reşadiye gemimizle Sultan Osman gemimizin üstüne oturur musun?”
― Kemal Tahir, Köyün Kamburu

“Plainly, by the turn of the century, the Marines' combatant image was etched onto the imaginations of the American people. The recruiting posters told the story. In 1907, when Army posters said, "Join the Army and Learn a Trade," and Navy posters said, "Join the Navy and See the World," the Marine posters came to the point with disarming simplicity, "First to Fight.”
― Estate of V H. Krulak, First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps

“I just call a volunteer standing two steps next to me who holds
his head out for too long after the shot. At that moment, his head jolts, the
familiar and terrible dull sound of the bullet’s impact sounds, and the man
slowly collapses. The bullet penetrated the forehead and tore off half the
skullcap behind. Still mid-fall, he claws his hands into the wound and smears
himself over and over with his own brain. It was a terrible sight.”
― Philipp Cross, The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer

“The war, in brief, provided an unparalleled opportunity for the richest families to grab, at the expense of the public; and, without exception, they made the most of this opportunity. Some of the families took profits in the stock market, and hence did not figure directly in the industrial looting. Up to September 1, 1919, the War Department spent $18,501,117,999, and, judging by the Graham Committee's findings, at least one-third of this was dissipated in channels that had no relation to a successful prosecution of the war.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“The consequences of the 1918 armistice that became the 1919 Treaty of Versailles slammed into the last century like a hurricane making landfall at high tide, pushing ever more violent waters up the rivers of history, transforming streams into raging cataracts and covering the global landscape with an ever-rising flood. Looking back over the last hundred years and seeing the fervent desire for war and the sadistic means in which armies murdered their way to bitter victory, we have to grimly conclude that the Great War never ended.
The nightmare continued.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“It is the strategy of truth, the simple and clarifying truths by which a nation such as ours must guide itself. The strategy of truth is not because it deals in truth devoid of strategy, it is not enough in this war of hoaxes and delusions and perpetuated lies to be merely honest. It is necessary also, to be wise. - A quote by Archibald MacLeish included in Chapter 6: Berlin Calling”
― Jill Lepore, Who Killed Truth?: A History of Evidence