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Quotes About First World War

vague anti-semitism developed into fully-fledged hatred, derived from specious and elaborate notions of Jewish conspiracy such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Translated by V.E. Marsden, correspondent of the Morning Post, the book purported to prove the existence of an age-old Zionist plot to take over Europe; in fact, it was an invention of Tsarist secret police in Russia, a 'farrago of nonsense' given plausibility by the events of the First World War.
~ Philip Hoare
earlier wars, and in the Second World War, generals, even marshals, also ran risks and died in action. In the First World War they led comfortable lives. All except Kitchener. He was the only outstanding military figure on either side who came to a violent end. Asquith
~ A.J.P. Taylor
constant companions throughout the project: Stanley Weintraub's A Stillness Heard Round the World, A. J. P. Taylor's The First World War, John Keegan's The First World War, and Malcolm Brown's The Western Front.
~ Joseph E. Persico
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
Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.
~ Richard C. Armitage
MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.
~ Richard Engel
Sims revolutionized American gunnery in the early years of the century, was Mahan's leading contestant in the Dreadnought controversy, and commanded the United States Naval Forces in European waters in the First World War. Sims's reasoned, sagacious, and totally crushing attack on the Mahan school decided American battleship construction policy in the vital years leading to 1912. Sims made America a major maritime power.
~ Richard Hough
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
When I was doing the research for Fall of Giants I was shocked to realize that the First World War was a war that nobody wanted. No European leader on either side intended it to happen. But the emperors and prime ministers, one by one, made decisions—logical, moderate decisions—each of which took us a small step closer to the most terrible conflict the world had ever known.
~ Ken Follett
The following is a narrative poem. It became a huge success at the time of its publication, and inspired the 1944 movie The White Cliffs of Dover. It is about an American girl who visits London just before the First World War, marries, and stays in England during the succeeding years, including the start of the Second World War.
~ Alice Duer Miller
If Cody's fame and popularity seem strange to us today-he was, after all, celebrated for his prowess in killing, both buffalo and Indians-it is because his virtues were nineteenth-century virtues, and we live in an age of disillusion and cynicism. Cody's death, in a way, along with the First World War, signaled the end of those nineteenth-century values.
~ Robert A. Carter
There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?
~ Robert H. Jackson
The French government employs teams of démineurs, roving bomb-disposal specialists, who respond to calls when villagers discover shells; they collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions each year. More than 630 French démineurs have died in the line of duty since 1946. Like those shells, the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated.
~ Adam Hochschild
Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War.
~ Adam Hochschild
The Duke was strongly pro-German, indeed considered himself almost German, telling Diana Mosley, 'Every drop of blood in my veins is German.'15 He spoke German fluently and sometimes referred to it as his mother tongue and had spent most of his summers before the First World War visiting German relatives. The murder of his Russian relations in 1918 had had a profound influence on him and he always considered communism as the real threat to Britain's interests and empire.
~ Andrew Lownie
My own experience of the First World War, and my readings in history,' he was later to write, 'had convinced me that the Prime Minister should be a man who knew what war meant, in terms of the personal suffering of the man in the line, in terms of high strategy, and in terms of that crucial issue – how the generals got on with their civilian bosses.
~ Andrew Roberts
In a great little book that he had the moral courage to publish during the First World War, Sigmund Freud traces physical heroism back to the fact that every man of intelligence knows that he must some day die, but that no man, in his innermost soul, ever believes in his own death.
~ Lion Feuchtwanger
My father was in the First World War.
~ Doris Lessing
Dos años más tarde estalla la Primera Guerra Mundial, en la que Louis-Ferdinand participa con su regimiento en las cruentas batallas de las fronteras de Flandes. En una misión para la que se había presentado voluntario es herido
~ Louis-Ferdinand Celine
By the end of 1914, after less than five months of combat, more than 600,000 soldiers on both sides had been killed on the Western Front.
~ Russell Freedman
Although 2,466,719 volunteers had joined the army by the end of 1915, in January 1916 conscription had to be introduced. In all, 5,704,000 men served in the British army during the First World War, split roughly equally between volunteers and conscripts.[137] The army of the First World War was larger by far than any other army raised by Britain, before or since.
~ Gary D. Sheffield
After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.
~ Antony Beevor
Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
~ ballard j g vi
Two German-held villages, Mametz and Montauban, were captured on July 1, as well as a German strongpoint, the Leipzig Redoubt. The human cost of the day's attack was higher than on any other single day of battle in the First World War. Just over a thousand British officers and more than 20,000 men were killed, and 25,000 seriously wounded.
~ Martin Gilbert