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“Bertrand Russell, too old for military service, but an ardent pacifist (a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and asked: ‘Tell me, if a company of your men were brought along to break a strike of munition makers, and the munition makers refused to go back to work, would you order the men to fire?â€�
‘Yes, if everything else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.�
He asked in surprise: ‘Would your men obey you?�
‘They loathe munition-workers, and would be only too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all skrim-shankers.�
‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?�
‘Yes, as well as I do.�
He could not understand my attitude.”
― Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

“Like most things unwanted, the end of the artillery barrage came without consideration or introduction; the seconds after its cessation were like hours. The silence was debilitating for the men, as it signilled the beginning of the real battle—the fight with enemy soldiers.”
― Michael J Murphy, Beneath the Willow

“I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

“We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered with all their men and all their engines, sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics, romantics, symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. We knew that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the misty bulk of history, the phantoms of huge vessels once laden with riches and learning. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours. Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and splendid names; the total ruin of these worlds, for us, meant as little as did their existence. But France, England, Russia, these names, too, are splendid. And now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world. We feel that a civilization is fragile as a life.”
― Paul Valéry

“No lack of time, strength or money shall prevent me from doing anything that I want to do,â€� was Sarah Macnaughtan’s lifelong motto, first uttered in her younger years. A compassionate and daring woman ahead of her time who stood barely over 5 feet tall, Sarah let no obstacles become roadblocks in her life.”
― Noel Marie Fletcher, The Strange Side of War: A Woman’s WWI Diary

“And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistakes; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, [the general who concocted the attack plan] but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.â€� What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“She'd do what she could to make life a little sweeter for the people around her. She'd live until she didn't anymore.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“Her unique observations are about how the war
impacted people—from the thrill-seekers going to battlefields for fun, to the nurses working among the wounded in darkness, and London society women venturing into foreign lands to work near dangerous enemy lines.”
― Noel Marie Fletcher, The Strange Side of War: A Woman's WWI Diary

“His jaw is on the floor. Here is someone who doesn't think that anybody does anything better than America and he is getting a lesson in what the best army in the world looks like.”
― Dan Carlin, Blueprint for Armageddon

“They went chasing round and round. Round and round the mulberry bush. The Hun could fly. This must be one of Richthofen's young men.”
― V.W. Yeates

“It doesn't matter now that they lived and died, but rather did they make a difference?”
― D. Dauphinee, Highlanders Without Kilts

“It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy

“I was entirely unconvinced about anything, except that some people were strong and attractive and could do what they wanted, and others were caught and disgraced.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“That's the best way, I think, to handle what life throws at us. Grab hold of it. Make whatever we can with whatever pieces we have.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“No more hidden pieces, buried in the sand. They need to be seen. How can we ever be understood, be truly loved, if we don't show all our most important pieces?”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“They'd said that whatever drug they'd slipped into his veins would make the journey comfortable. They'd said that he wouldn't even be aware of the trip, that he'd wake up in London and be on the mend. They'd said that rest was all he needed.
They'd lied.”
― Roseanna M. White, The Number of Love

“This new lot...they too would go down. They were 'troops' who were about to be 'thrown in,' 'men' in some general's larger plan, 're-enforcements ' and would soon be 'casualties'. They were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo.”
― David Malouf

“I felt bad for them and smiled.”
― Ira Campbell, Mein Gustav

“The Patriot Act, signed by President George Bush, is the American version of The Enabling Act which was signed by German President, Paul von Hindenburg.”
― James Thomas Kesterson Jr

“Bergson felt the event of the First World War this way. Before it broke out, it appeared both possible and impossible (the similarity with the suspense surrounding the Iraq war is total), and at the same time he experienced a sense of stupefaction at the ease with which such a fearful eventuality could pass from the abstract to the concrete, from the virtual to the real.
We see the same paradox again in the mix of jubilation and terror that characterized, in a more or less unspoken way, the event of 11 September.
It is the feeling that seizes us when faced with the occurrence of something that happens without having been possible.
In the normal course of events, things first have to be possible and can only actualize themselves afterwards. This is the logical, chronological order. But they are not, in that case, events in the strong sense.
This is the case with the Iraq war, which has been so predicted, programmed, anticipated, prescribed and modelled that it has exhausted all its possibilities before even taking place. There is no longer anything of the event in it. There is no longer anything in it of that sense of exaltation and horror felt in the radical event of 11 September, which resembles the sense of the sublime spoken of by Kant.
The non-event of the war leaves merely a sense of mystification and nausea.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“I love you, Robert. No matter what happens, I always will.â€�

“Wherever we may be, I shall never love another but you.� Thornes voice trembled, just enough for Jack to sense the trepidation in him. “And I never have until I saw you.�

Jack pressed his lips to Thornes neck.

“I loved you from the moment you first smiled at me.”
― Catherine Curzon, The Captain and the Cavalry Trooper

“The truth is, no study is possible on the battlefield. One does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal, and to know it well.”
― Ferdinand Foch, The Principles of War

“Even when one was following God's illogical plans, things still went wrong.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“He'd grown accustomed to the yawning emptiness in his own life. Perhaps it always chafed like imagined sackcloth, but like sackcloth in the scriptures, he'd decided at some point in the last months that it ought to be a reminder to fall to his knees. Perhaps the cup given him wasn't happiness, but rather holiness. Perhaps he could do as a man of prayer all that he'd failed to do as a man of action.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled-- we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial-- I believe we are lost.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On The Western Front

“To The Warmongers

I'm back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.

Young faces bleared with blood
sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain

Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.

For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.

But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems

“Think, only think, what this war will mean to women’s progress,â€� he once said to me. There would be all sorts of stupidities and crimes on both sides committed in the name of love and patriotism. I said there would be a colossal spread of disease and a lot of babies whom no one wanted.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“The great strength of Bukharin’s analysis lies in his refusal to accept that state control can be identified with “socialismâ€� in any form. In the First World War the fact that the whole of social and economic life was subject to the domination of the militarised state meant that amongst the capitalists there were many who claimed that this was “state socialismâ€�. Ironically Bukharin did not see that the same thing had happened in Soviet Russia as a result of the civil war.”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“Izolarea la care au fost supuÈ™i basarabenii în timpul regimului È›arist a făcut ca aceÈ™tia să nu fie pregătiÈ›i pentru evenimentele care au avut loc în anii 1917â€�1918. După cum am văzut în capitolele precedente, unii dintre ei se „deÈ™teptauâ€� în timpul studiilor din marile oraÈ™e ale Imperiului Rus, când luau exemplu de la estonieni, polonezi, ucraineni etc. Văzând că aceÈ™tia vorbeau în propria limbă, aveau un cult pentru propriii lor scriitori etc., moldovenii au început să aibă idealuri precum introducerea limbii române în È™coală, biserică È™i administraÈ›ie sau chiar proclamarea unei autonomii locale în Basarabia. Acestor idealuri li se adăuga, sub influenÈ›a miÈ™cărilor socialiste din Rusia, necesitatea de a dobândi „pământ È™i voieâ€�, cum spuneau ei, ceea ce se traducea prin introducerea votului universal È™i realizarea unei reforme agrare. ÃŽn special aceste două deziderate îi mobilizau pe moldoveni, iar pământul era cerinÈ›a cea mai importantă pentru ei. ÃŽn ceea ce priveÈ™te unirea cu România, aceasta nu exista în lista de deziderate ale elitei basarabene în 1917, cu mici excepÈ›ii. AtaÈ™amentul față de Rusia era unul puternic, moldovenii considerând că problemele pe care le întâmpinau se datorau doar regimului È›arist. Guvernul provizoriu sau „vremelnica stăpânireâ€�, cum i se spunea, avea o componentă socialistă solidă, ceea ce le dădea încredere românilor din Basarabia că viitorul le va aduce realizarea reformelor sociale de care aveau nevoie. Pe de altă parte, majoritatea moldovenilor nici nu erau conÈ™tienÈ›i de apartenenÈ›a lor la poporul român, mulÈ›i aflând de acest lucru cu ocazia intrării în contact cu fraÈ›ii lor de peste Prut, pe frontul din România. ÃŽn plus, chiar dacă unii ar fi vrut, în sinea lor, ca Basarabia să se unească cu România, acest lucru părea imposibil din moment ce România era aliată cu Rusia în război.”
― Andrei Popescu, Elita Basarabiei la 1917-1918. Zece personalități care au făcut Unirea