Antony Beevor Quotes

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

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

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

'Into the Blizzard' follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.

[Describing World War I:] A short cleansing thunderstorm.

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.

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.

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

I'm a bit embarrassed about how little I know about the First World War. I didn't even know that tanks were used in it.

At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.

Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.

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.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

My father was in the First World War.

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

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

Everyone has come to recognize that the Great War [World War I] was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all.

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.