First World War Quotes

I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.

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.

No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

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.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

I am fascinated by Omega's history. Particularly the First World War stuff, when they made watches for the flying corps, and the NASA side of it.

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

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

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.

The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.

My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War.

Mehmet Ertegun died in 1944. President Roosevelt sent his body back to Turkey on the U.S.S. Missouri. Mehmet Ertegun and President Roosevelt had had a cordial relationship, and, indeed, Mehmet Ertegun may have helped insure that Turkey did not ally itself with Germany, as it had in the First World War.

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

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war'... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.

Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, 'Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.'

We still have documents from the First World War that have not yet been declassified. I have no idea why. It boggles the mind.

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.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.