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Quotes About Great War

Well, now I come to think of it, there was another Johann Diesbach, Johann Jacob Diesbach, a Berlin paint maker who invented the color Prussian blue, back in 1706. The whole Prussian army wore coats of Prussian blue until the Great War, when it moved over to field gray. At one time every Berlin schoolboy used to know the name of Johann Jacob Diesbach. So how about that, sir? How about Prussian blue?
~ Philip Kerr
I have to hand it to you people. Three attempts to kill Hitler in as many weeks and all of them botched. You would think that a group of senior army officers would know how to kill one man. It's what you're supposed to be good at, damn it. None of you seemed to have any trouble slaughtering millions during the Great War. But it seems beyond any of you to actually kill Hitler. Next thing you'll be telling me you were planning to use silver bullets to shoot the bastard.
~ Philip Kerr
How did it ever get to be that bad? I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering.
~ Philip Kerr
Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.
~ Philip Zaleski
The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.
~ Laurence Housman
So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!
~ Abraham Lincoln
It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb planet.
~ Ray Bradbury
The last deaths of the Great War on the western front occurred at midnight on the twelfth in Hamont, a Belgian town near the Dutch border. Retreating German troops, believing they were the last to leave the city, mined the Hamont railroad station. But one final train filled with German soldiers arrived from Antwerp. The mine went off with a roar that flung railway cars into the air like matchboxes. Hundreds of German soldiers thus died thirteen hours after the armistice went into effect.
~ Joseph E. Persico
Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides
~ James Quinn
In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not.
~ Paul von Hindenburg
Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.
~ Lisa Gardner
When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself, who was to die in grief not long thereafter, would survive Wilson's abhorrence of war.
~ E.L. Doctorow
I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.
~ Henry Williamson
The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.
~ Adrienne Mayor
the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His
~ Kate Atkinson
The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom. When they point from the other side of the glass, Freedom isn't free, I hear the patriots say. Blah, blah, blah. They're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. The Great War cost me a lot, and although it's not a competition, on this, the eve of my centenary, I can honestly conclude that it cost Whit more.
~ Kathleen Rooney
The worst thing about Farrington's poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned.
~ Kathleen Rooney
They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness.
~ Kathy Hepinstall
Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!
~ Abraham Lincoln
For Reuter, it was the last act of the Great War and something which reduced, if it did not remove, the shame of defeat and surrender. The message, for those who chose to think about it, was that Germany was down but not out - defeated but not reconciled.
~ Andrew Marr
There is a fascinating dichotomy in that, although the appeasement movement was intended to prevent another war breaking out, most of its leaders had not seen action in the Great War, whereas most of the anti-appeasers had.
~ Andrew Roberts
It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,' Churchill later wrote of the moment the Great War ended.
~ Andrew Roberts
Many historians still cite Lloyd George's previously quoted comment that the European nations 'stumbled into war' as evidence that no nation was entirely free of guilt for the conflict, but a careful analysis of German plans and ambitions in the pre-war years by the German historian Fritz Fischer confirms the popular opinion that the root causes of the Great War were German militarism and political ambition - and that these roots had been established for some time.
~ Robin Neillands