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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:

I believe that, once this war is done, once the Ukrainians have won, then yes they should begin the process of induction both to Nato and to the EU.

Boris Johnson

I stopped the war between Pakistan and India.

Donald Trump

We have everything for a still; I stocked the items to build one if a war came along—not just for us but because liquor is money in any primitive society.

Robert A. Heinlein Farnham's Freehold (1964)

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.

Saul Bellow The Dean’s December (1982)

We don't like to kill our unborn, we need them to grow up and fight our wars.

Marilyn Manson The High End of Low (2009)

They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war — as though the absence of war was the same as peace.

Dorothy Thompson

And as a matter of fact Rumsfeld, Now that I think back, Without 9/11 you couldn't have a war in Iraq.

Immortal Technique Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.

Aldo Leopold

The tide of war does not recede just because we wish it to.

John McCain

Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now.

Cindy Sheehan

The truth is, I was never a very good Party man. Probably but for the War of 1914, I should have gone on fairly comfortably as a Conservative official.

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood A Great Experiment (1941)

Thus for ane Dow of Dunbar drew I this Dyte, Dowit with ane Dowglass, and boith war thei dowis.

Richard Holland The Buke of the Howlat (1450)

Prepare for war, for you have found peace intolerable.

Scipio Africanus

Germ warfare against the United States would escalate to war against all humanity.

Yoshijirō Umezu

Indeed I am inclined to go so far as to say that the one cause for which one may properly make war is the cause of peace.

Ralph Barton Perry

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Barbara Tuchman A Distant Mirror (1978)

Wars do not make heroes of everyone.

Jane Yolen Briar Rose (1992)

Not power not cruelty not death not winning not fighting not money not oil not war not sex not tyranny: all tyrants fall.

Martin Firrell The Question Mark Inside (2008)

That ageing geriatric whizz-kid seems intent on starting World War III.

Gerry Adams

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