Nick Harkaway Quotes

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.

Seventeen million people around the world lost their lives in the first world war, countless suffered and were marred for life.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

My father was in the First World War.

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.

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.

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

I'm fascinated by the First World War because it was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it was the biggest conflagration that this particular planet had seen. There was a lot of talk about utopia and how it was possible, and then, because of these events that for one reason or another couldn't be stopped, the idea of utopia went out the window.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

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.

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.

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

'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.

Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders. No doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind in the point.

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.

We've talked and written about the World War so much that it has almost been purged off. The bitterness is gone. The drama came to an end and it is history.

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.

The first war zone was declared by Great Britain. She gave us and the world notice of it on the 4th day of November, 1914. The zone became effective Nov. 5, 1914.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.