Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

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

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.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

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.

Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war she has witnessed since the Fall of the Roman Empire… The blame must fall on Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak in Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so.

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

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

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.

No, but the Germans have been to France twice in my lifetime.

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

The big wars of the 20th Century, like the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, were all wars about elite control.

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

When the war was in progress, England and France agreed wholeheartedly with the Fourteen Points. As soon as the war was won, England, France, and Italy tried to frustrate Wilson's program because it was in conflict with their imperialist policies. As a consequence, the Peace Treaty was one of the most unequal treaties ever negotiated in history.

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.

We have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm as they did in Sarajevo.

Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.

The crisis of the old order in Europe produced nearly 80 years of often bloody conflict between democracy and its foes from 1914 to 1991.