1914 Quotes

“Only by understanding the past may we free ourselves from its tyranny.”
― Paul Ham, 1914: The Year the World Ended

“The memo provoked, and still provokes, deep division. At the time, the Foreign Office’s most strident critic was Thomas Sanderson, who rejected Crowe’s simplistic portrayal of German history as ‘an unchecked record of black deeds’.24 Since then, however, historians have tended to come down on Crowe’s side. Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War is the most controversial meditation on the idea that Germany sought to conquer Europe and the world. Yet his book is confined to Germany’s aims during the war, i.e. after the war began, when all nations were fighting for their lives; it finds no persuasive evidence that Germany intended global conquest – through force of arms – before the war began.”
― Paul Ham, 1914: The Year the World Ended