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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:

Saddam is a war criminal and there are no two people who can argue over this.

Muqtada Sadr

We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.

Thomas Friedman

I heard somebody say that the war ended today, but everybody knows it's going still.

Devendra Banhart

I should like to have been killed in the war.

Enoch Powell

A nation that silences or intimidates original minds is left only with unoriginal minds and cannot hope to hold its own in the competition of peace or of war.

Henry Steele Commager Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954)

I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting.

Curtis LeMay

We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

Ron Paul

In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.

Andrew Bacevich The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005)

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

John McPhee The Control of Nature (1989)

I felt the ruthfulness and senselessness of war so acutlely that I wrote the first three stanzas of which, are in effect a prayer.

Richard Eberhart

The people who are slamming me have no idea about what it feels like to unjustly have a child killed in an insane war.

Cindy Sheehan

For he was a merciful man, who loved not slaughter, although his fierce faith drove him from war to war.

H. Rider Haggard The Brethren (1904)

We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war.

Edward Heath

We can't ignore the fact that ahead of us is a great war and this war is going to need significant preparation.

Ahad Ha'am

All these blunders were, in war as in peace, the outcome of the deceptive selection and presentation of news.

Emil Ludwig Wilhelm Hohenzollern: The Last of the Kaisers (1926)

If we are minded to affirm Christ's Kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin.

John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)

You seek up a big monster for him to fight your wars for you.

Dave Matthews Remember Two Things (1993)

It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism". We are at war with Islam.

Sam Harris

I didn't argue that the war in Vietnam was immoral; it was merely stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives based on a flawed premise.

Joe Biden Promises to Keep (2008)

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