Quote;Author;FR;FR;ITA;ITA;SPA;SPA;GER;GER;POL;POL;POR;POR;RUS;RUS
'Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.';General Ferdinand Foch, 1911;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking.';General Ferdinand Foch to General Joseph Joffre during the First Battle of the Marne, 8 September 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.';Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'It takes 15,000 casualties to train a Major-General.';General Ferdinand Foch to General Joffre during the Battle of the Marne;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men's souls.';Woodrow Wilson, Message to Congress, 19 August 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'It must be a peace without victory… Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished.';Woodrow Wilson, 22 January 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.';Woodrow Wilson, 8 September 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.';General Herbert Plumer before the Battle of Messines 1917, in which mines were extensively employed;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Leave me alone… I nibble them.';General Joseph Joffre, 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.';Vladimir Lenin;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.';Vladimir Lenin;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.';Vladimir Lenin;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.';Georges Clemenceau;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time.';Sir Edward Grey, August 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Victory in this war will belong to the belligerent who is the first to put a cannon on a vehicle capable of moving on all kinds of terrain.';Colonel Jean Baptiste Estienne, 24 August 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'For Christ's sake men—come on! Do you want to live forever?';Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly prior to charging the Germans during the Battle of Belleau Wood, 6 June 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'God would never be cruel enough to create a cyclone as terrible as that Argonne battle. Only man would ever think of doing an awful thing like that.';Alvin C. York, account of his Medal of Honor-winning action north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France, 8 October 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.';Alvin C. York, account of his Medal of Honor-winning action north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France, 8 October 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'There were so many prisoners, there was danger of our own artillery mistaking us for a German counterattack and opening upon us.';Alvin C. York, account of his Medal of Honor-winning action north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France, 8 October 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'I reported to Brigadier General Lindsey, and he said to me, "Well, York, I hear you have captured the whole damned German army." And I told him I only had 132.';Alvin C. York, account of his Medal of Honor-winning action north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France, 8 October 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.';Kaiser Wilhelm II, August 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The English were beaten. The spell of Trafalgar has been broken.';Kaiser Wilhelm II in Wilhelmshaven after the Battle of Jutland, 5 June 1916;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun.';Kaiser Wilhelm II in Hamburg, 18 June 1901;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The Tsar is not treacherous but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions.';Kaiser Wilhelm II on his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'I believe in the horse, the automobile is just a temporary phenomenon.';Kaiser Wilhelm II;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'[The Balkan case would] plunge Europe into a war whose issue no man can foresee. At the end of the conflict we should scarcely know why we had fought.';Otto von Bismarck, February 1888;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution.';General Erich Ludendorff, 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Ils ne passeront pas!' ('They shall not pass!');General Robert Nivelle, during the Battle of Verdun after the Germans captured Fleury on 23 June 1916;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'I hate to shoot a Hun down without him seeing me, it is against what little sporting instincts I have left.';James McCudden, VC, RFC, 13 January 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The monsters approached slowly, hobbling, rolling and rocking. Nothing stopped them. Tongues of flame leapt from the sides of the iron caterpillars.';German war correspondent at the Battle of the Somme, 1916;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn.';Pvt. R.A. Colwell, Passchendaele, January 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'My soldiers see only two supernatural outcomes: victory for the faith or martyrdom. Do you know what the second means? It is to go straight to heaven.';Mustafa Kemal, 20 July 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The machine gun is a much over rated weapon.';General Douglas Haig, 1915;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy.';General Douglas Haig, 21 March 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The nation must be taught to bear losses. No amount of skill, no superiority of arms and ammunition will enable victories to be won without the sacrifice of men’s lives.';General Douglas Haig before the Battle of the Somme began;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Retreat? Hell, we just got here!';U.S. Marine Corps Captain Lloyd W. Williams, 1st June 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'In Flanders fields the poppies blow - Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place.';John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" (1918);;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'In war-time the word patriotism means suppression of truth.';Siegfried Sassoon in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Gott strafe England.' ('May God punish England.');Slogan of the German Army, attributed to Ernst Lissauer;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'All the peoples are appearing in the streets of Europe, each with a little torch in hand – and now we see the fire.';Jean Jaurès, 25 July 1914 (five days before his assassination);;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'To die, not to retreat.';From the Order of the Day of General Luigi Cadorna, 7 September 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'We heard strange throbbing noises, and lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before.';Bert Chaney on the debut of British tanks in the Battle of the Somme, 15 September 1916;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'My only consolation for the failure of the Dardanelles was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war.';Winston Churchill, 1929;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in vain appeals against the decision of fate.';Winston Churchill;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'To the aircraft I aim, not the man.';Francesco Baracca, Italy's leading ace;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Won't it be nice when all this beastly killing is over, and we can enjoy ourselves and not hurt anyone? I hate this game.';Albert Ball, VC, RFC, in letters to his father and fiancée;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood and the last drop of fuel, to the last beat of the heart.';Manfred von Richthofen;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'A pretty mechanical toy but of very limited value.';Lord Horatio Kitchener on tanks, 1915;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Men would claw at their throats in a futile attempt at relief. Their bodies swelled as they writhed on the ground in agony, their tongues hanging out.';Sgt Charlie Parke on chlorine gas used at Ypres, April 1915;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'All heroes! Or the Piave or all dead!';Anonymous writing on a wall near Fagaré, Italy, June 1918;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Here we are - Like leaves on trees, in Autumn.';Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Soldiers" (1918);;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'To prevent a catastrophe the Tsar himself must be removed, by force if there is no other way.';Alexander Kerensky, speech in the Duma, 27 February 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The world thinks the Russian Revolution is at an end. Do not be mistaken. The Russian Revolution is just beginning.';John Reed interviewed Alexander Kerensky soon after he formed his new government, 8 July 1917;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her Colonial trade against foreign competitors.';King George V, speech at Guildhall, 5 December 1901;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill.';Tsar Nicholas I of Russia referring to the Ottoman Empire, 1853;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War.';Maclean's Magazine (Canada), October 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'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.';Ernst Haeckel, September 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'This is already the vastest war in history. It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age.';Herbert George Wells, "The War That Will End War", October 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.';David Lloyd George, 1916;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'After the "War to end War", they seem to have been in Paris at making the "Peace to end Peace".';Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Shoot twice and go home.';Swiss response to Kaiser Wilhelm II's question in 1912 as to what the 250,000 Swiss militiamen would do if invaded by half a million German soldiers;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Even if a submarine should work by a miracle, it will never be used. No country in this world would ever use such a vicious and petty form of warfare.';British Admiral William Henderson, 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The gravity of the situation demands that we should free ourselves from all scruples.';German Admiral Hugo von Pohl about unrestricted submarine warfare, November 1914;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Not bad, considering that I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.';David Lloyd George, commenting on the attributes of W. Wilson and G. Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'The War office kept three sets of figures - one to mislead the public, another to mislead the cabinet and the third to mislead itself.';British Prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.';Admiral David Beatty, Battle of Jutland 1916 after HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary both exploded within minutes of each other;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'You should give the name of German such cause to be remembered in China that no Chinaman will dare look a German in the face.';Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1900, to troops leaving to fight the Boxer Rebellion;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
'Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, others can come and take our place.';Mustafa Kemal, orders to the 57th Infantry Regiment, at the Battle of Gallipoli, 25 April 1915;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
