The Great War Quotes

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones. ~ Colum McCann

Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were born of the 'peace' imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War. Saddam is such a product in an even more Flagrant and cynical way. Because the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard

We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo ... ~ Aldous Huxley

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood - a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth. ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War. ~ Chuck Jones

I do occasionally wonder, if you were to bring to life one of those young men who sacrificed themselves in what was advertised to them as the Great War, and the war to end all war, and show them that we're still engaged in armed conflict in the same area, I'm not sure that they would be pleased about what their sacrifices amounted to. ~ Russell Crowe

It is a strange thing how quickly our bodies die. How fragile a force our presence is. In an instant the soul is gone - leaving an empty, insignificant vessel in its stead. I have read of those sent to the gallows and guillotines of Europe. I have read of the great war of ages past and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to such deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts. But in doing so, we forget that they were each as alive as we, and the one length of rope - or bullet - or blade, took the whole of their lives in that one, fragile instant. Took their earliest days as swaddled infants, and their grayest unfulfilled futures. When one think of how many souls have suffered this fate in all of history - of the untold murders of untold men, women and children.. it is too much to bear. ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

since the Depression, we bankers have had the leisure and . . . solitude, you might say, to think about the future. The Civil War left us with a federal government. The Great War made us a creditor nation. As bankers, we must anticipate what changes this war will thrust upon us."
[…] The old man leaned forward and took a long breath. "I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever," he said quietly. "Not the Romans. Not the Carolingians. Not Genghis Khan or the Tatars or Napoleon's France. Hah! You're all looking at me like I've one foot in the funny farm. How is that possible? you ask. Because our dominance won't arise from subjugating peoples. We'll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We'll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible. ~ Jennifer Egan

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven. ~ Christopher Buehlman

Shortly before the outbreak of the Great War it was calculated that four per cent of the population of England held ninety per cent of all the wealth of the country. In the United States sixty percent of the wealth was held by two per cent of the people while at the other extreme of the social scale sixty-five per cent of the population representing the labor element, the main factor in the production of wealth, possessed no more than five per cent of the total riches of the land. ~ Joseph Casper Husslein

Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War. ~ Adolf Hitler

THE CAUSE of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them. ~ Winston Churchill

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. ~ Ralph Adams Cram

The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography. ~ Simon Singh

The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again. ~ Anne Sullivan

In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral degradation: I do what I want and don't give a damn about others. ~ Elvira Baryakina

We will continue to march, even if everything shatters, because today Germany hears us, and tomorrow, the whole world. And because of the Great War, the world lies in ruins, but devil may care, we build it up again. ~ Rhidian Brook

In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbors and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then. Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely. ~ Joseph Roth

No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops. ~ John J. Pershing

If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talking nonsense and shut the fuck up. It had slept, somewhat peacefully, through Emmet's Insurrection, World War I and II, Vietnam, and even the Great War of Blur Vs. Oasis. ~ Adam Millard

When the death toll among British troops was added to that of the carriers the official 'butcher's bill' in the East Africa campaign exceeded 100,000 souls. The true figure was undoubtedly much higher: as many a British official admitted, 'the full tale of the mortality among [the] native carriers will never be told'.2 Even 100,000 deaths is a sobering enough figure. It is almost double the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War; indeed it is equivalent to the combined casualties - the dead and wounded - sustained by Indian troops. It is as if the entire African workforce employed at the time in the mines of South Africa had been wiped out. Yet the East Africa campaign remains, by and large, a forgotten theatre of war. ~ Edward Paice

the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones. ~ William Dalrymple

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing." ~ Jacqueline Winspear

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies. ~ David Mamet

In the Great War, there is no room for the faint-hearted, the cowardly. A criminal or an anarchist will be better conditioned than a bourgeois, indecisive or cowardly man. They only need a push in the right direction. Only one who is born a hero or a warrior has a place in our order. Only the Lord of the Pure Will can march to the end, breaking in the gates of the City of Eternal Life. Because will, through its perseverance, creates the thing it contemplates. Only the Wild Hordes of Odin and Parsifal will achieve the Graal. ~ Miguel Serrano

This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them
was hurt or molested by our band. ( ... )
The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon
their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and
we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect
their property.
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right
look like wrong, and wrong like right. ~ Black Hawk

Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinuviel as 'the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, "the wheels of the world", are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak'. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations. ~ John Garth

What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere ... ~ Timothy Findley

History is replete with the seeds of apocalypse. In particular, the 19th/early 20th Century in France was a time of country-shattering events, whether it was the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte (the creation and brutal upending of a whole new social order, within scarcely more than a decade), or the Great War (which devastated the country to a degree that is hard to believe today, wiping out an entire generation in the trenches). It was no great stretch to imagine a magical war engulfing Europe in 1914, and leaving Paris as a field of ruins filled with magical booby traps–the familiar monuments destroyed, the Seine overflowing with the residue of spells.

It's no secret that I'm fascinated by the narrative of war, and of recovery after war: how people struggle to rebuild lives and go on in the wake of world-shattering devastation; how the past can still cast a long, terrible shadow over everything; how the years before the war become a golden thing, regardless of how many injustices and hardships might have been happening then. I'm equally fascinated by history–the narratives that get preserved and enshrined, the stories that are passed down; and the speed with which some things get forgotten while others endure for generations. For me, the vocabulary and tropes of post-apocalypse were a great way to tackle those subjects, and to imagine what would happen in a city that had such a traumatic event in its past. ~ Aliette De Bodard

Catalonian industry had flourished by supplying the belligerent states engaged in the Great War, during which my mentor, the then-president, Eduardo Dato, who years before had given me my start in the legal profession in his private law firm, had pronounced Spain's neutrality in the conflict, a decision ratified by King Alfonso XIII. ~ Sergio Vila-Sanjuan

In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not. ~ Paul Von Hindenburg

Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, "cynical" strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the 'eighties or earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the old - young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and "God save the Queen" rather than steel helmets and "Hang the Kaiser." And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian - he stood for a k ~ George Orwell

Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noice like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly against the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great war; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Our room swallowed light whole. Even in summer when sunlight glared through the windows, it was somehow dim inside. Now it was only Easter morning, and the muted sky of early spring offered scant relief to our tenebrous room. On our side of the house a gnarled and ancient oak tree spread its reach across the back facade of the house as if to shade and protect us. One of the massive branches of its principal fork reached invitingly right up to our window to offer to take us wherever we wanted to go. This great limb, with circumference grander than both of us together, was our stairway to heaven and our secret exit to the ground; it was our biplane in the Great War of our imaginations and a magic carpet to Araby; it was our lookout post and the clubhouse of our most secret fraternal order; it was our secret passageway through the imaginary castle we made of our house. It was our escape from the darkness into the light. ~ Mason West

For Reuter, it was the last act of the Great War and something which reduced, if it did not remove, the shame of defeat and surrender. The message, for those who chose to think about it, was that Germany was down but not out - defeated but not reconciled. ~ Andrew Marr

My mother never gave in. One of Father's friends had once said that if Mother had been in charge, the Great War would have been over by 1916. Father had replied that if my mother had been in charge, she would have made damn sure the bloody thing hadn't started in the first place. Mother always said it wasn't just about keeping going, but about standing up for what you believed in as well. ~ A.J. Pearce

The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. ~ Robert Service

When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans. ~ Vera Brittain

The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time. ~ Studs Terkel

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet - a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles - let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word "mother" and the word "kaiser" was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about - and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His ~ Kate Atkinson

Soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. ~ James Lee Burke

61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws. ~ Ishmael Reed

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

In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke. ~ Max Heindel

The French are completely without scruples, energy or valor - the Great War castrated them and left them diminished, whiney, mistaking bickering for debate and shrillness for eloquence, they are a nation in such effete decline that Shickelgrubber, when he finally attacks them, might be dancing with the keys to Paris in his hand after a week or two of puny skirmishing. ~ Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim

The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed. ~ David Lloyd George

Marlowe grinned. That so? I couldn't disagree more. Is that Nietzsche talking? Ah, the Germans. We have a factory in Germany, you know. Actually, Germany is a fine example, so let's take Germany: They were crushed in the Great War. Their debt was staggering. A pound of bread cost nearly three billion Marks! The Reichsmark was practically worthless - you'd have better luck papering your house with it than trying to buy goods or pay your bills. But Marlowe Industries is going to help them get on their feet. We're going to change the world. ~ Libba Bray

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

The cream of a generation was lost in the mud of Flanders. Etonians went over the top with the Illiad in their knapsacks and Athens in their hearts. To protest that such men were statistically not even a trace among the British soldiers killed is to miss the point. At all times the great majority of people have been ignorant of the classics; but the men who mattered; who governed, declared wars and resisted innovation have always had Latin and Greek. ~ William Donaldson

The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly ... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one. ~ Philip Zaleski

In each succeeding war there is a tendency to proclaim as something new the principles under which it is conducted. Not only those who have never studied or experienced the realities of war, but also professional soldiers frequently fall into the error. But the principles of warfare as I learned them at West Point remain unchanged. ~ John J. Pershing

When Roy's 32nd Division arrived in France, the Great War had been grinding on for over three years. Though called the "War to End All Wars," it was the "War that Went on Forever" to those in it. The lines were static, the casualties horrendous, and hope for any breakthrough was fleeting. ~ Paul T. Dean

I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again. ~ Henry Williamson

They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife). ~ Jonathan Stroud

How are you off for drink? We have got everything in the world on board here. Can you catch?' and almost immediately a large bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat to the shore. It fell in the waters of the Nile, but happily where a gracious Providence decreed them to be shallow and the bottom soft. I nipped into the water up to my knees, and reaching down seized the precious gift which we bore in triumph back to our mess.

This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. Here and there in every regiment or battalion, half a dozen, a score, at the worst thirty or fourty, would pay forfeit; but to the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished and light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game. Most of us were fated to se a war where the hazards were reversed, where death was the general expectation and severe wounds were counted as lucky escapes, where whole brigades were shorn away under the steel flail of artillery and machine-guns, where the survivors of one tornado knew that they would certainly be consumed in the next or the next after that.

Everything depends upon the scale of events. We young men who lay down to sleep that night within three miles of 60,000 well-armed fanatical Dervishes, expecting every moment their violent onset or inrush and sure of fighting at latest with the dawn – we may perhaps be pardoned if ~ Winston S. Churchill

It has been estimated that of the world Jew population of approximately fifteen millions, no fewer than five million are in the United States. Twenty-five percent of the inhabitants of New York are Jews. During the Great War we bought off this huge American Jewish public by the promise of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, held by Ludendorff to be the master stroke of Allied propaganda as it enabled us not only to appeal to Jews in America but to Jews in Germany as well. ~ Sidney Robertson Cowell

They used to call it the 'Great War'. But I'll be damned if I could tell you what was so 'great' about it. They also called it 'the war to end all wars' ... 'cause they figured it was so big and awful that the world'd just have to come to its senses and make damn sure we never fought another one ever again.
That woulda been a helluva nice story.
But the truth's got an ugly way of killin' nice stories. ~ Max Brooks

King Edward, who "smoke cigars, was addicted to and entente cordials, married a Sea King's daughter and invented appendicitis," pursued a policy of peace that "was very successful and culminated in the Great War to End War. ~ Jane Ridley

Tolkien preferred the still, small voice of Elijah to the resounding horns of Sinai. Accordingly, his commitment to myth as his medium was dogged. He repeatedly denied that The Lord of the Rings was allegory. The reason is this: allegory intends that this particular thing in the story is meant to be that particular thing known outside the story. In a way, it is coercive, forcing the reader to see things in a certain way. For example, Lewis's lion in the Narnia books, Aslan, is meant to be understood by the reader as a representation of Christ. Tolkien, in fact, was annoyed with Lewis for engaging in allegory, which he found heavy-handed. (Lewis, for his part, denied that his Narnia books were only allegory.) He believed myth to be a more artistically subtle device. Tolkien did not, for instance, intend his War of the Ring to be a battle of good versus evil. He didn't see matters in such black-and-white terms and did not believe in absolute evil. During the Great War, he didn't view the Germans as all bad and the English as all good. In the Lord of the Rings, even Sauron, like Lucifer, did not start as evil. Evil for Tolkien was a personal battle within each and every individual. A battle might be won or lost, but the war was unending. ~ Wyatt North

These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth. ~ Amish Tripathi

Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty-five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed
realisation of ideas".

In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen-twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle-aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for ~ H.G. Wells

I do not think that in those early days of September, Hitler was fully aware that he had irrevocably unleashed a world war. He had merely meant to move one step further. To be sure, he was ready to accept the risk associated with that step, just as he had been a year before during the Czech crisis; but he had prepared himself only for the risk, not really for the great war. ~ Albert Speer

If only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened. ~ Vera Brittain

I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness.
George Malory to his wife Ruth at the end of the Great War ~ Wade Davis

It's always the same war. Only the names of the dead change. It's always about one thing: which group of rich men get to divvy up the spoils. They call it 'The Great War' - clever marketing. ~ A.G. Riddle

Before the whole world, I accuse you, German intellectuals, you non-Nazis, as those truly guilty of all these Nazi crimes, all this lamentable breakdown of a great people
a destruction which shames the whole white race ... ~ Bronislaw Huberman

McQueen was daring, original, exciting. He shook up the establishment with his creativity and understood what it takes to be a great British ambassador for fashion. I admired him very much. He was a fashion revolutionary that, like me, made the journey from [Central] Saint Martins to Paris where he put his own unique mark on the industry. He will not be forgotten. ~ John Galliano

That Kierkegaard was a stimulating and pioneering force precisely because of his neurosis is not surprising since he started out with a conception of God that had a peculiar Protestant bias which he shares with a great many Protestants. To such people his problems and his grizzling are entirely acceptable because to them it serves the same purpose as it served him, you can settle everything in the study and need not do it in life. Out there things are apt to get unpleasant. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth - part of the general lunacy of our time. It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. ~ C.G. Jung

Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her? ~ C.S. Lewis

The tusk is a very tactile shape, looks great among the other charms and is a cool piece that I like. ~ Victoria Beckham

My business partner gave me a drone, a small helicopter you pilot with an iPhone, and also it has a camera so you can see what it sees on the iPhone. Great fun. I fly it outside in Portugal. It's wonderful to oversee gardens. ~ Christian Louboutin

I like to foster an atmosphere on set of collaboration and openness and risk taking. The beauty is when you have such brilliantly talented people as I did in my cast, you definitely don't want to fetter them in any sense. You want them to be able to go out there and do their thing and feel confident in doing their thing, because ultimately I'm the person who gets the credit which is great. ~ Dan Mazer

Reading has always been the great love of my life. ~ Darren Shan

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him. ~ Betty Smith

And what an honour to have been chosen. How silly to have been so frightened! Naturally the great leaders of the State would not allow harm to come to an innocent citizen who worked hard and had no black marks on her zapiska. Suddenly she felt immensely grateful to the father-figure that was the State, and proud that she would now have a chance to repay some of her debt. Even the Klebb woman wasn't really so bad after all. ~ Ian Fleming

It was a relief when we reached the village of Lumm. We did not go into it but rode on the outskirts. When the great mage-built bridge came into view I felt Shevraeth's arm tighten as he looked this way and that.
On a grassy sward directly opposite the approach to the bridge a plain carriage waited with no markings on its sides, the wheels and lower portions muddy. The only sign that this might not be some inn's rental equipment were the five high-bred horses waiting nearby, long lines attached to their bits. A boy wearing the garb of a stable hand sat on a large rock holding the horses' lines; nearby a footman and a driver, both in unmarked clothing but wearing servants' hats, stood conversing in between sips from hip flagons. Steady traffic, mostly merchants, passed by, but no one gave them more than a cursory glance.
The gray threaded through a caravan of laden carts. As soon as the waiting servants saw us, the flagons were hastily stowed, the horse boy leaped to his feet, and all three bowed low.
"Hitch them up," said the Marquis.
The boy sprang to the horses' mouths and the driver to the waiting harnesses as the footman moved to the stirrup of the gray.
No one spoke. With a minimum of fuss the Marquis dismounted, pulled me down himself, and deposited me in the carriage on a seat strewn with pillows. Then he shut the door and walked away.
By then the driver was on her box, and the horse boy was finishing the last of the harnesses, helped by ~ Sherwood Smith

According to Mustafa Elhussein, secretary of a center for Muslim intellectuals known as the Ibn Khaldun Society, "There is a great deal of bitterness that such groups have tarnished the reputation of mainstream Muslims" because "self-appointed leaders . . . spew hatred toward America and the West and yet claim to be the legitimate ~ Craig Unger

The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test. ~ George W. Bush

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin ... Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle. ~ James A. Michener

The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one's humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive ... this is a matter of aesthetics, taste ...
... It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.
So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood. ~ Jeffrey Panzer

The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it's all the same thing. ~ N.K. Jemisin

The real attitude of sin in the heart towards God is that of being without God; it is pride, the worship of myself, that is the great atheistic fact in human life. ~ Oswald Chambers

I think about my life and what's important to me sometimes. Working for WWE and being a Diva has really been the only thing that's made me feel great about myself. ~ Natalya

No risk is too great if the potential reward is revenge. ~ Paul Platt

I'm a great believer in luck and the extraordinary role that plays in all of our lives. ~ Paul Newman

The deepness and consistency of your repenting will have a direct impact on the liveliness of your faith and the brightness of your confidence. This is not because you repent so well, but because in repenting you know the darkness and trouble of your own sin, and the great work of grace in Jesus that overcomes it all. ~ Joe Thorn

I love Jimi Hendrix obviously, and Jimmy Page and Prince. And also Elvis Presley is a really great guitar player. I don't think he ever took lessons; he was piecing it together himself. But he has great rhythm. And rhythm, to me, you can use it to your advantage if you're not all over the fretboard. ~ Brittany Howard

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [ ... ] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. ~ Sigmund Freud

You cannot make thousands of universities or hundreds of thousands of professors, but with technology and the Internet you can have great courses and make a digital university. ~ Carlos Slim

It's natural for children to drift through their early childhood taking their parents for granted, then adolescence rears its ugly head and insouciance morphs into rebellion as they strive to define themselves by being as different from those who gave them life as possible. But for me, now on the eve of my sixteenth year, familial insurrection had yet to seize me - and in reality, it never would. I was my father's son. His moral compass was inexorably mine. I knew that day I would forever define myself not by contrasts to my father, but by emulation, striving to be a "good man" like him. But the term "good man" was not adequate to describe him. Daddy was a great man who charted his own course in life, guided by his own light, irrespective of the opinions of others, be they my grandmother's or those of his Brothers in the Lodge. He was the kind of man I wanted to be, the kind of man I was already becoming without fully realizing it. ~ G.M. Frazier

What happened?" he asked brusquely, interrupting me.
"What do you mean, what happened?"
"I sensed your fear, heard you call out my name."
"I ... no, I didn't." Stone Wall, I told myself. Great Wall of China, around my thoughts.
"The Great Wall of China isn't going to do it, Violet. Come on, tell me what happened. ~ Kristi Cook

Those we hold dear leave a part of themselves with us when they return to their eternal Home. As they move on to partake of the one Great Love that unites us all, the love they leave with us as they depart remains forever in our hearts. ~ Joyce Hutchison

Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California. ~ J. Maarten Troost

Sometimes things you write are messages to yourself. Even though I think my stuff has a particular voice because you are who you are, it's good to switch it up, professionally and personally. The dare to be great situation is always going to be the one that matters the most. ~ Cameron Crowe