Wasteland Quotes

“The consequences of the 1918 armistice that became the 1919 Treaty of Versailles slammed into the last century like a hurricane making landfall at high tide, pushing ever more violent waters up the rivers of history, transforming streams into raging cataracts and covering the global landscape with an ever-rising flood. Looking back over the last hundred years and seeing the fervent desire for war and the sadistic means in which armies murdered their way to bitter victory, we have to grimly conclude that the Great War never ended.
The nightmare continued.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“Americans thus proved themselves ready to remember an idealized version of the men who had fought the war while forgetting the actual people. At least in the minds of the politicians and the general public, the veterans represented a demographic small enough to forget. Such a mind-set has made the costs of the war, perhaps the experience of war itself, difficult for the United States to fully grasp.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror