Gallipoli Quotes

Australians and New Zealanders don't talk about Gallipoli in terms of invasion. I started talking about it and using that word and at first there were a few people who were getting upset in the same way that in any country, if you work for a newspaper you know exactly the dude you can go and talk to get a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to something to do with the military. ~ Russell Crowe

The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. ... He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. ... He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable. ~ Elaine Scarry

Harris looked up at the sky and then stared at Stuart. "The sun will set soon. Follow Lieutenant Morley to the aid station."
"I'm all right, Sergeant. I want to stay with my brother."
Harris looked Stuart up and down. "You're covered in blood."
Stuart looked Harris up and down. "So are you, Ser- geant."
Harris looked at his own uniform and pursed his lips. "Good point; well made. All right, stay if you want. ~ R.J. MacDonald

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

My dad always told me that the principal reason he chose New Zealand to emigrate to after World War II was the high regard his father had for the Kiwis he encountered at Gallipoli. ~ Peter Jackson

By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. ~ Scott Anderson

Torpedo! Starboard side!" The lookout grasped the cold metal handrail tightly, his knuckles white, staring helplessly as a 20-foot torpedo, travelling at 60 feet per second, disappeared from his view to ram 400 pounds of high-explosive TNT-Hexanite into the majestic ocean passenger liner. ~ R.J. MacDonald

I didn't want to write a grown-up account of Gallipoli. I wanted to find out what would happen if I looked at Gallipoli through the eyes of an innocent. ~ Kerry Greenwood

Peace at Home, Peace in the World ~ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Of the many million pairs of grieving parents, we will never know how many felt that their sons had died for something noble, and how many felt what one British couple expressed in the epitaph they placed on their son's tombstone at Gallipoli: 'What harm did he do Thee, O Lord? ~ Adam Hochschild

All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire. ~ James Connolly

In later years, it was common, and I was guilty in this respect, to question the motives of those who joined the new British armies at the outbreak of the Great War, but it must, in their honour and fairness to their memories, be said that they were motivated by the highest purpose, and died in their tens of thousands in Flanders and Gallipoli, believing that they were giving their lives in the cause of human liberty everywhere, including Ireland. ~ Sean Lemass

lads who were to fight, and perhaps fall, on the fields of France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Palestine, were still roguish schoolboys with a fair life in prospect before ~ L.M. Montgomery

Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Every drop of blood that falls in Tibet or Cambodia or Gallipoli or Iraq lands upon our shoes and spatters the hem of our best suit. ~ Mark Collins

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. ~ Laurence Binyon

I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic. ~ Deborah Kara Unger

More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli. ~ Alistair Cooke

In working with the wounded at Gallipoli, the lead character comments, Perhaps life was the nightmare and death the awakening. ~ Anne Perry