Adam Hochschild Quotes

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 Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

The first 'world' war was in reality the last European war fought by globally significant European powers.

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.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

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

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

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

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

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.

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.

As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

Britain and America won the last world war. We will win the next world war.

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

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.

I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.

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

Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war.

The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.

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

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?