Geoff Dyer Quotes

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

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.

My father was in the First World War.

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

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

Remember that everybody signed up as fast as they could in World War I because they thought the war would be over by Christmas.

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

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 may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

Brits, Indians, Frenchmen and Belgians fought side by side in the trenches of the Somme and on the fields of Ypres.

My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad's tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.

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?'