Quotes on World War I

Indeed I do not think we should be justified in using any but the more sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire, and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?

When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly."

Adolf Galland said that the day we took our fighters off the bombers and put them against the German fighters, that is, went from defensive to offsensive, Germany lost the air war. I made that decision and it was my most important decision during World War II. As you can imagine, the bomber crews were upset. The fighter pilots were ecstatic.

Unless we establish some form of world government, it will not be possible for us to avert a World War III in the future.

Every honor is appropriate for the courageous Americans who made the supreme sacrifice for our Nation at Pearl Harbor and in the many battles that followed in World War II. Their sacrifice was for a cause, not for conquest; for a world that would be safe for future generations. Their devotion must never be forgotten.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.

I'll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can. In the meantime, you've got to hold!

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Saving Italy is an astonishing account of a little known American effort to save Italy’s vast store of priceless monuments and art during World War II. While American warriors were fighting the length of the country, other Americans were courageously working alongside to preserve the irreplaceable best of Italy’s culture. Read it and be proud of those who were on their own front lines of a cruel war.