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You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

— Siegfried Sassoon The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

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More quotes by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom.

Everyone Sang (1919)

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?

Collected Poems (1949)

Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war.

Robert Nichols in his introduction to The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Collected Poems (1949)

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt,
And every grin so merry draws one out.

John Wolcot

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Siegfried Sassoon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.