George Percival Auld Quotes

The Germans, if this Government is returned are going to pay every penny; they are going to be squeezed as lemon is squeezed – until the pips squeak. My only doubt is not whether we can squeeze hard enough, but whether there is enough juice.

Slavery, which has been abolished in Africa, is to be introduced in Europe. The German people are ready to make good the damage done. But we are not prepared to perish for the benefit of international capitalists.

The conduct of Germany is almost unexampled in human history. The terrible responsibility which lies at her doors can be seen in the fact that not less than seven million dead lie buried in Europe, while more than twenty million others carry upon them the evidence of wounds and sufferings, because Germany saw fit to gratify her lust for tyranny by resort to war.

France has no intention of holding the Ruhr permanently. She means to stay there until she is paid, or has assurances that she will be paid.... We intend to hold the mining and industrial basin until Germany fulfills its agreement…. Paralyzing the mining industry in the Ruhr may inflict hardships on France as well as Germany, but Germany is the greater loser and France will show the endurance necessary to outwit the German Government.

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

There is fear as to whether Japan, reduced to such a predicament, could ever manage to pay reparations to certain designated Allied Powers without shifting the burden upon the other Allied Powers.

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

We should never get out of Iraq without wrenching something, such as the national honour or the interests of bondholders.

I want to tell you that I think this war is a great mistake. If we had come to terms with Mussolini, as I wanted to do, we might have held Germany. That is no longer possible. We have given most of Europe to Hitler. Let us try to hold on to what we have got left. I am a peasant from the Auvergne. I want to keep my farm, and I want to keep France. Nothing else matters now.

If Germany wins, she will dominate France; the independence of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and perhaps of Norway and Sweden, will be a mere shadow; their separate existence as nations will be fiction; all their harbours will be at Germany's disposal; she will dominate the whole of Western Europe, and this will make our position quite impossible. We could not exist as a first class State under such circumstances.

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.

To-day the Peace Treaty was ratified at Paris; the War is over. A terrible era begins for Europe, like the gathering of clouds before a storm, and it will end in an explosion probably more terrible than that of the World War. In Germany there are all the signs of a continuing growth of nationalism.

Reliable information has been received by the Imperial Government to the effect that French forces intend to march … through Belgian territory against Germany. The Imperial Government cannot but fear that Belgium, in spite of the utmost goodwill, will be unable, without assistance, to repel so considerable a French invasion with sufficient prospect of success to afford an adequate guarantee against danger to Germany. It is essential for the self-defense of Germany that she should anticipate any such hostile attack. The German Government would, however, feel the deepest regret if Belgium regarded as an act of hostility against herself the fact that the measures of Germany's opponents force Germany, for her own protection, to enter Belgian territory.

He who is calmly convinced of the probability of a great European war can come to no other conclusion than the following: The next European war will be such a desperate gamble as the world has never seen. In all probability it will be the last war.

You have repeatedly asserted that you and the German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war. Nothing can persuade the peoples of the earth that any governing power has any right or need to inflict the consequences of war on its own or any other people save in the cause of self-evident home defense.

We lay a mortgage on every unborn child for a hundred and more years to come. Mortgage his brain, his brawn, and every pulse of his heart in order to pay the debt, to buy the material to slaughter the men of our country. And that is not all, the greatest crime of war is the crime against the unborn. Read what they are doing. They are calling out every man, every young man, and every virile man from seventeen to forty-five or fifty years old; they are calling them out. All the splendid scientific force and energy of the splendid virile manhood are being called out to be food for the cannon, and they are leaving behind the degenerate, defective imbecile, the unfit, the criminals, the diseased to be the fathers of children yet to be born.

I obtained the occupation of the Rhineland for fifteen years, with partial evacuation after five years. If Germany does not fulfill the treaty, there will be no evacuation either partial or definitive. At last I am no longer anxious. I have obtained almost everything I wanted.

We should have known better after the first war.

The case still seems overwhelmingly strong that Germany bore principal blame [for WWI]. Even if it did not conspire to bring war about, it declined to exercise its power to prevent the outbreak of restraining Austria. Even if Berlin did not seek to contrive a general European conflagration, it was willing for one, because it believed it could win.

When Germany was defeated in 1918, the Armistice was granted upon the understanding that Germany would be required to pay for the damage sustained by the civilian populations in the victorious countries. The ascertainment of the amount of that damage was of course extraordinarily difficult …. political embarrassments would have been encountered in fixing the precise amount, for passions were running so high that any indemnity within the bounds of reason would have been too low to satisfy popular expectations.

The political control of this great industrial weapon means political supremacy both in war and peace. The history of the increasingly bitter struggle between France and Germany for control of the industry indicates a growing recognition of this fact.

The dead lay stacked like folding chairs overlapping each other where they fell.

The demands of Germany may require too much sacrifice of the rights of others for them to be granted, but for the peace of the world they must be considered with the utmost seriousness, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that sooner or later some of them will have to receive satisfaction.

The birth of world peace can take place only on the Rhine and only as guaranteed by the Rhinelanders. The disturber of peace upon the Rhine is Prussia. War is her national industry, and it is she who forces the German people, who are naturally peace-loving, ever anew to "appeal to the sword." We Rhinelanders are Germans, but we are not Prussians. Take Prussia off the Rhine and you will see that a Germany freed from Prussian leadership is quite capable of coming to a lasting understanding with France.

I now seriously ask whether an English victory would not be more desirable for our future than a German victory.