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Memorial Day Quotes

This page is assembled from three others: War, Death and Gratitude. There is no memorial collection underneath it. One poem is filed against the day itself, Joyce Kilmer’s, in Trees and Other Poems (1914), and it opens with a bugle that, he says, is not singing of war today.

The rest is whatever the three source pages rate highest, so it leans toward poetry and toward writers who saw war up close. Several famous lines about death and sacrifice carry flags here, so read the note on a quote’s own page before you attach a name to it.

Random quote on Memorial Day

Most quoted on memorial day:

The cost in human lives of every armed conflict is staggering, but the economic cost of wars can continue for generations.

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

War is the highest summit of human achievement; it is the natural, the final stage in the historical development of humanity.

Hans von Seeckt

War, dreadful war, and Tiber flood
I see incarnadined with blood.

John Conington The Aeneid of Virgil (1866)

Now we have the prospect of a religious war on our hands, with the attendant proliferation of “heresies” and two separate but equal inquisitions.

George Alec Effinger What Entropy Means to Me (1972)

Soldiers usually are close students of tactics, but rarely are they students of strategy and practically never of war.

Bernard Brodie

I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn't. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical.

Pierce Brown Dark Age (2019)

To make war, you had to be filled with love, with a vehement passion, exalted, intoxicated, otherwise the whole thing was inhuman and absurd.

Gabrielle Roy The Tin Flute (1945)

Go capture the fort which you could not win by war, but now we've left it at our own will.

Balbhadra Kunwar

Communists, when in control of a nation, have murdered more than 3.6 times the number of people killed in combat in all wars, including the two world wars.

Rudolph Rummel The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)

Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?

Charles Coughlin

The greatest redemption is between the war of two evils, their very retaliation reveals their goodly nature.

Michael Lieber The War Hero (2018)

Everyone in Iraq, Christians and Muslims alike, has suffered because of the war.

Jacques Ishaq

One can safely call what it has escalated into World War III That’s absolutely for sure.

Olga Skabeyeva

I hate Putin's Russia, but love all Russians who are clearly against this crazy war!

Oleg Tinkov

Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was inconceivably bloody — nobody who wasn't there can ever imagine what it was like.

Maurice Bowra

"When you have lost a war, you have lost, and there's nothing you can do about it but accept the consequences."

Femi Osofisan Women of Owu (2006)

War never ends, but only moves to another place?

Femi Osofisan Women of Owu (2006)

The Russians do not want to invade anyone. The only reason they wage war is to ensure the security of their borders.

Nicolai Lilin

What I write about is not war but the courage of man.

Cornelius Ryan

From the heart of Aleppo, I declare to the world that our war with tyrants has ended, and our battle against poverty has already begun.

Ahmed al-Sharaa Presidency (2025)

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