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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:

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")

Adrienne Rich What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)

Only the Jews had remained victorious after the dreadful days of World War I. These were the people of whom Christ said, "Its father is the devil."

Julius Streicher

In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system.

Walter Schellenberg

All societies that have survived have survived based on their ability to prepare their sons to be disposable, in war and at work--and therefore as dads.

Warren Farrell The Myth of Male Power (1993)

He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder.

Murray Leinster Anthropological Note (1957)

Modern warfare is ghastly beyond exaggeration and civil war among industrial populations is the most diabolical form of conflict.

Kirby Page Individualism and Socialism (1933)

War is atrocity; war is a method of savage violence.

Kirby Page Must We Go to War? (1937)

A deep fog of obscurity is thrown about war by the use of misleading and confusing terms.

Kirby Page Must We Go to War? (1937)

It is no longer possible to place a halo around war and speak of it in idealistic terms.

Kirby Page What Does God Want Us to Do About Russia? (1948)

Preparedness to use the weapons of war creates the tempers, the quarrels and the crises which lead to the outbreak of war.

Kirby Page What Does God Want Us to Do About Russia? (1948)

Let us be clear: the Yemeni revolution has already brought internal stability to a state riddled with war and conflict.

Tawakkol Karman Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen (2011)

Our security has been diminished rather than enhanced as a result of the conquests in this war.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz The Territories (1968)

In many places Muslim pirs directed these attacks and characterized them as a holy war waged against infidels, that is Hindus and Sikhs.

Gurbachan Singh Talib Muslim League Attack on the Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab, 1947 (1950)

The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule.

Kevin Carson The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege (2011)

War is time that has marched through the mind, and is later presented in

Paavo Haavikko

This, if not an act of war, was certainly a warlike act by the Russian Federation…

Tom Tugendhat

Plans for far-reaching changes in the character of international society are an intellectual by-product of all great wars.

Nicholas J. Spykman America's Strategy in World Politics (1942)

Colonel Ann Wright (US Army, Ret.) speaking at the fourth annual "Make Food Not War" awards dinner hosted by Peace Action Staten Island.

Ann Wright

The Global War on Terror has become the Pentagon’s greatest tool in waging endless military campaigns.

Tom Engelhardt

War had a way of making carpe diem seem valid no matter what you wanted to seize...

Steve Perry The Tejano Conflict (2014)

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