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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:

All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.

Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)

Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate.

Francis Parker Yockey Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948)

He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.

Ramsey Clark

I think it was Osama bin Laden’s [idea to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq].

Karl Rove

Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust.

John Buchan Huntingtower (1922)

England, France, and Russia have conspired...to wage a war of annihilation against us.

Wilhelm II, German Emperor

Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.

Richard Wagner Religion and Art (1880)

That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics.

Sheri S. Tepper The Fresco (2000)

I fear that, eventually, we are all going to become collateral damage in the war on drugs, or terrorism, or whatever war is in vogue at the moment.

James C. Nelson

When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

A lot of people seem to me to be losing their heads, and talking and thinking as though Munich had made war more, instead of less, imminent.

Neville Chamberlain

An independent state does not pay too dear for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them

Theodor Mommsen

Al-Qaeda organisation in Iraq...has declared war against Shias in all of Iraq.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?

Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

Try to live the war pictorially studying it in all its mechanical forms (military trains, fortifications, wounded men, ambulances, hospitals, parades, etc).

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

All wars will be settled by sea power.

Erich Raeder

War is war. The strong will always crush the weak. The only difference is that in the process some have made a lot of money and others a lot of misery.

Chinua Achebe Girls at War and Other Stories (1973)

To win wars, we had to train our sons to be disposable. We honored boys if they died so we could live. We called them heroes.

Warren Farrell The Boy Crisis (2018)

War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway.

Michael Herr Dispatches (1977)

There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions.

Arthur Desmond Rival Caesars (1903)

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