World War 1 Short Quotes & Sayings

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse. — Winston Churchill

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world. — Barry Goldwater

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign. — Theodore White

My schooling was disrupted by the shortage of labor during World War I. It meant foregoing high school. Then, late in 1921, I entered upon a short course in agriculture at South Dakota State College. I managed to enter college in 1924, and I was permitted to complete my college work in three years. — Theodore Schultz

Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war. — Robert McNamara

I think the rest of the world will think we're made, and indeed we are. We've turned out the greatest Prime Minister in the post war years simply because of short term nerves. — Ann Widdecombe

World War II was really unusual, because America was in the Great Depression before. So the war did help the US economy to get securely out of this decline. This time, the war [in Iraq] is bad for the economy in both the short and long run. We could have spent trillions in research or education instead. This would have led to future productivity increases. — Joseph Stiglitz

Except for a short period at the end of World War II, I attended an elementary school affiliated to Kobe University from ages six to twelve and then moved on to Nada Middle and High School from ages twelve to eighteen. I enjoyed many out-door activities in my youth. — Ryoji Noyori

decision-making. Far from placing the nation and the world at risk to protect his own reputation for toughness, he probably would have backed down, in public if necessary, whatever the domestic political damage might have been. There may be, in short, room here for a new profile in courage - but it would be courage of a different kind from what many people presumed that term to mean throughout much of the Cold War.7 — Robert F. Kennedy

The world has been tragic since the day Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. From that moment murder, mayhem and war entered the scene and we are still suffering the consequences of a man-driven, self-serving, short-sighted environment. — Louie Giglio

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I. — Jonah Goldberg

There are six billion egos living on this planet. Can you not see why the world is in such a sorry state? Can you not see why we are destroying Heaven on Earth for our own short-term gain? Can you not see why the tiger and the gorilla are facing extinction, along with countless other species? Can you not see why there is so much injustice, abuse, greed, cruelty, and inequality upon this planet? We get along with those who share the same set of illusions. It is called collusion. They are our friends. We declare war on those who dare to believe in another set of illusions. They are our enemies. Religion, and particularly religious fundamentalism, is the most obvious and dangerous example. Nationalism is another. "Me! Me! Me!" "Mine! Mine! Mine!" "I'm right. I'm right. I'm right." "How can I use this or make use of this?" "What's in it for me?" You — Mary Bruggeman

Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then ... Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain ... It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time. — H.G.Wells

But after World War II, the brothers realized they were running hard just to stay in one place. They weren't building volume even though their parking lot was always full. So they did a courageous thing. They closed that successful restaurant in 1948 and reopened it a short time later with a radically different kind of operation. It was a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu, the prototype for legions of fast-food units that later would spread across the land. Hamburgers, fries, and beverages were prepared on an assembly line basis, and, to the amazement of everyone, Mac and Dick included, the thing worked! — Ray Kroc

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading. — Will Eisner

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence
on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. — John F. Kennedy

What rendered it all acceptable was that government won the war, in astonishingly short order. Had the war dragged on or ended badly, the trust reposed in government might have been withdrawn. But the greatest conflict in human history was brought to a victorious conclusion for the United States only three and a half years after American entry. America's unprecedentedly large government defeated fascism; America's big government placed the United States at the pinnacle of world power. In the process, big government restored the nation's economic vitality and self-confidence. By 1945 most Americans found big government thoroughly acceptable, even necessary, and they had ample reason for feeling the way they did. — H.W. Brands

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.
p. 71 — Ernst Junger

Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war. — Starhawk

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting. — Stuart Jaffe

The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived. — Alcoholics Anonymous

Our lives are a flicker of light in the shadowy darkness of eternity. Disease, famine, war, death, sorrow... Life is a cycle of pain, perhaps the one thing we should do with our short lives is to try to leave the world a better place than we entered it?'"

~Vexis Zaelwarsh - Low Priestess to Avanti
-Deathsworn Arc 4: Rise of the Archmage — Martyn Stanley

At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war. — Jacque Fresco

I guess that isn't the right word, she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. — Kurt Vonnegut

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood. — Colin A. Ross

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs ... — H.G.Wells

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars ... The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him. — Albert Einstein

Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war - except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war - short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide - is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong - wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. — Susan Sontag

People of the world, the time for decision is short. It is measured in a few years. The choice is ours as to whether or not we will pay the price of peace. If we are not willing to pay it, all that we hold dear will be consumed in the flame of war. The darkness in our world today is due to the disintegration of things which are contrary to God's laws. Let us never say hopelessly this is the darkness before a storm; rather let us say with faith this is the darkness before the dawn of the golden age of peace, which we cannot now even imagine. For this, let us hope and work and pray. — Peace Pilgrim