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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:

Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way.

Donald Trump

"We remind our churches to maintain the emphasis on the war against indecent dressing"

Peter Akinola

Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...

J. G. Ballard A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.

Pat Buchanan Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

We are now in a new era. To label this time "the post-Cold War era" belies its uniqueness and its significance. We are now in a Global Age.

Al Gore

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

John Steinbeck Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals.

Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

P. D. James Paris Review (1995)

The question of who strikes first in a war is on the same level as who strikes first in a boxing contest.

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

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world.

Wendell Berry Citizenship Papers (2003)

An army that waits is soon an army at war with itself.

Steven Erikson House of Chains (2002)

By 2014, the war in Afghanistan will be over.

Barack Obama

Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.

William McKinley

I am a Liberal, first of all, because of the unfaltering resistance which liberalism is pledged to offer to those twin dangers of fascism and war.

Michael Foot

If we do not succeed with political union...then the historic decline of Europe which began with the First World War will resume.

Jacques Delors

Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means.

Max Frisch Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

It is high time we treated drug abuse and terrorism as diseases instead of wars -- curing the patients rather than killing them.

Newton Lee

Having lost the last war, they are currently enjoying a Wirtschaftswunder, which can be briefly translated as "The best way to own a Mercedes is to build one."

Alan Coren The Sanity Inspector (1974)

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to John Sinclair (1798)

If you want to buy my wares
Follow me and climb the stairs …
Love for sale.

Cole Porter

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