#wwi

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. ↗

— Wilfred Owen

#pity #war #wwi #death

I did a film called 'Fort McCoy,' based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States. ↗

— Eric Stoltz

#based #called #camps #did #during

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses. ↗

— George Orwell

#england #nobility #orwell #royalty #uk

...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory. ↗

— James D. Hornfischer

#combat #war #wwii-history #experience

A man must know his destiny… if he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder… if he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it. ↗

— George S. Patton Jr.

#wwii #imagination

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays! ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#humor #prophetic #humor

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #denunciation #evil #good #jews

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore. ↗

— George Orwell

#hypocrisy #journalism #poland #stalin #warsaw-uprising

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine. ↗

— Sebastian Faulks

#war #wwi #love

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#humor #internet #neal #stephenson #wwii