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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:

War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers.

Henri Barbusse Light (1919)

These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.

James Clavell King Rat (1962)

Fold him in his country's stars,
Roll the drum and fire the volley!
What to him are all our wars,
What but death bemocking folly?

George Henry Boker

There can't be two smart peoples in the world. We're going to win the war, so only the Aryan race will stand.

Josef Mengele Defy the darkness: A Tale of Courage in the Shadow of Mengele (2000)

What message, years of conflagration,
have you: madness or hope? On thin
cheeks strained by war and liberation
bloody reflections still remain.

Alexander Blok Those Born in Years of Stagnation (1914)

All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We’ve got to make it unthinkable.

Norman Thomas

A war is raging within me that burns everything. So I can begin again.

Karel Appel Karel Appel, a gesture of colour (1992)

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

David Gemmell

No matter how impossible this war, I shall fight to win. Whatever I have to do, I will do.

David Gemmell

Yes, Jesus faced the question of war.

Kirby Page The Sword or the Cross, Which Should be the Weapon of the Christian Militant? (1921)

I little thought, when the war was finished, that any circumstances could possibly have happened, which would call the General into public life again.

Martha Washington Letter to Mercy Warren (1789)

If you have not noticed, we are preparing for war. I’m sorry if that inconveniences you.

Tad Williams The Dragonbone Chair (1988)

War is the health of the State.

Randolph Bourne The State (1918)

In 1919 a nationalist general concluded bitterly that, when confronted by the ‘test of war’, Italy had demonstrated that ‘no one governed it.’

R.J.B. Bosworth Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)

As you know, wars always make certain people wealthier. A war has two functions: it serves for some to die and for other to become wealthy.

José Hermano Saraiva

We never wanted this war and we do not want Ukraine to burn because of the enemy. But if Ukraine burns, then Moscow will burn too.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy

We are in a Covid war I want to plead, I want to beg with Kenyans that we should not dance with death.

Anthony Muheria

Nobody ever really wins a war, when you get right down to it.

David Eddings The Redemption of Althalus (2000)

The way war makes people become monsters. They forget what normality is and end up infecting other people and turning them into monsters.

Richard Raaphorst

One taper lights a thousand,
Yet shines as it has shone;
And the humblest light may kindle
A brighter than its own.
Between a man of peace and war.

Hezekiah Butterworth

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