Armistice Quotes

This scene was little more than a somewhat hollow ceremonial gesture. The real work of the conference had already begun, by a far smaller, more elite, and far less disparate set of individuals. All were white Westerners of elite backgrounds with more congruent temperaments and, as it turned out, goals. The first unofficial meetings between the leaders of the Big Four peacemakers - dubbed the Supreme Council - and their aides had been taking place for a week in a smaller chamber in the same building, and the maneuverings were afoot. It was nine weeks since the armistice ~ David A. Andelman

What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization's war upon it. ~ Stephanie Mills

Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace. ~ Jacques Derrida

After further conferences that late spring the following plan was drawn up. Speidel, almost alone among the Army conspirators in the West, survived to describe it: An immediate armistice with the Western Allies but not unconditional surrender. German withdrawal in the West to Germany. Immediate suspension of the Allied bombing of Germany. Arrest of Hitler for trial before a German court. Overthrow of Nazi rule. Temporary assumption of executive power in Germany by the resistance forces of all classes under the leadership of General Beck, Goerdeler, and the trade-union representative, Leuschner. No military dictatorship. Preparation of a "constructive peace" within the framework of a United States of Europe. In the East, continuation of the war. Holding a shortened line between the mouth of the Danube, the Carpathian Mountains, the River Vistula and Memel. ~ William L. Shirer

Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things - the struggle for existence between two different forms of life... Incessantly, the pitiless war goes on, without quarter or armistice - a nationalism of species against species. ~ Hans Zinsser

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

On September 9, the day after Prevost's armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand - a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada. ~ Pierre Berton

Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on. ~ Thucydides

Before them stood a small, erect man who fixed them with a withering gaze, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. After cool introductions, Foch opened the proceedings with a question that left the Germans agape. "Ask these gentlemen what they want," he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: "Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make. ~ Joseph E. Persico

We have won an armistice on a single battlefield, not peace in our world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur-colored light ex-ploded through the black windowpane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, "What is happening?" for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamour went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt.

The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, "Hear that? They're celebrating . It's the Armistice. The war is over, my dear." Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, "My country, 'tis of thee…"

Sweet land… oh terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamour of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, "Sweet land of Liberty-"

"Oh, say, can you see?" their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. "The war is over," said Miss Tanner, her underlap held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, "Please open the window, please, I smell death in here. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

If I announce the armistice and the Americans don't send sufficient reinforcements and don't land near Rome, the Germans will seize the city and put in a puppet fascist government. ~ Pietro Badoglio

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon
millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate. ~ Bernard DeVoto

Birthed in a riotous sea of heat and violence, this world was never good, never peaceful, never without suffering, pain and anxiety. There was never an armistice between all living and not-so living things, nor can evidence be found to suggest there ever was - or still is - a loosely balanced war tumbling across Creation with the advantage swinging between the forces of light and happiness, and those of darkness and misery. Fire has always burned flesh, water has always drowned babies, and Creation has only ever exhibited but one impulse, one motive, one direction: towards increasing complexity, where complexity - across all systems, animate and inanimate - corresponds precisely to the degree and depth of potential suffering available to those contingent things whose participation in Creation was never solicited. ~ John Zande

When Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years. ~ Winston S. Churchill

I hate phone calls so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now. ~ Alexis Ohanian

When the armistice was declared American forces had fought their way to Sedan. ~ Kelly Miller

The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries. ~ Richard Aldington

Feel the bewitchment of silence, Stop the negotiations within, Give up the armistice with failure, When everything is lost which was meant to be, And now all that remains is you… ~ Piyush Rohankar

Was Philip Dexter upset?"
"He's telephoned the office every day."
She was pleased about that. "Who else was upset?"
"Everybody. Roosevelt orderded an hour of silence while you were on the table. Like Armistice Day. ~ Rose Franken

The Sabbath, thus, is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above. All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

It would be there - the eternal smell of the coffee the sugar the hemp sweating slow iron plates above the forked deliberate brown water and lost lost lost all ultimate blue of latitude and horizon; the hot rain gutterfull plaiting the eaten heads of shrimp; the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand airplants swinging stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonorafeet tigerbarred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in a myriad oil - tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure. ~ William Faulkner

What did you do on Armistice Night? My beloved is mine and I am his! ~ Ford Madox Ford

Nick got home the first week in December, to find New York still wallowing in its post-Armistice euphoria. Service men were celebrities wherever they went, and nothing was too good for them-especially the ones who were wounded-until it came down to such practical matters as finding housing or a job...It too him awhile to come to the conclusion that all the talk about help for veterans was just that, and anything that was done for him would have to be done by himself. ~ Nathaniel Benchley

All soldiers dreamed of armistice, after all. ~ Courtney Milan

We stopped the fighting [in 1991] on an agreement that Iraq would take steps to assure the world that it would not engage in further aggression and that it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict. ~ Harry Reid