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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:

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

Cyril Connolly The Condemned Playground (1945)

While the world waited, Saddam Hussein met every overture of peace with open contempt. While the world prayed for peace, Saddam prepared for war.

George H. W. Bush

This war [in Vietnam] has been marked by so many lies and evasions... that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie.

Donald Rumsfeld

War creates its own intensity of hatred... You don't want to use force except as an absolute last resort.

Wesley Clark

He was still having trouble readjusting. Wars were something you studied, not something that actually happened.

Robert A. Heinlein Between Planets (1951)

I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism. I absolutely believe that. … I will campaign for her if it's McCain.

Ann Coulter

Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy.

Carl von Clausewitz On War (1832)

I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?

Joseph Goebbels

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.

Woodrow Wilson The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

I do not want us to fight a war that no one ever meant to begin.

Lyndon B. Johnson Control of Nuclear Weapons (1964)

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command.

Eugene V. Debs The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Therefore, as we see it, the cold war is not an attempt to change each other's systems of government, but to influence those that are uncommitted.

Walter Reuther Meeting with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev (1959)

The war in Iraq was misconceived from start to finish — if it has a finish.

George Soros Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

Agreed, reject...This is the end of negotiations with America, once and for all! If Wilson wants war, let him provoke it and then have it.

Wilhelm II, German Emperor

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.

Stendhal La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

Before war can be fought, a long series of necessary steps, which quite obviously are not and cannot be enforced steps, must be taken by the mass of men.

Norman Angell Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over.

Joe Biden

How can [Tony] Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.

David Hockney

Now with our concentrations in Sinai, the chances of war are fifty-fifty. But if we close the Strait, war will be a one hundred percent certainty.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

It was a new kind of class war — the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

Irving Kristol

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