Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg Quotes

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

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.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

War is in the eyes.

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

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

I don't know what is to be done. This isn't war.

And this I hate—not men, nor flag nor race, But only War with its wild, grinning face.

Then comes the catastrophe. Then the great mobilization will take place in Europe; 16-18 million men, the flower of the various nations, armed with the best tools of death, will enter the field as enemies. But, I am convinced, that behind the great mobilization there stands the great havoc. It will not come through our party, but rather yours. You are driving things to the limit. You are leading us to catastrophe. You will reap what you have sown

War is the father of all.

… a war of the world

There are worse things than war.

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

There can be no peace until this German spirit of Militarism is crushed.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.