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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 am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!

Donald Trump

Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977.

Roger Ebert

We did not start the so-called war in Ukraine. On the contrary - we are trying to finish it.

Vladimir Putin

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.

Ulysses S. Grant

I hate war. It's terrible beyond imagination.

John McCain

I was in a conference in Germany over the weekend and president Putin of Germany gave one of the old Cold War style speeches.

John McCain

The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War.

William Saroyan The Human Comedy (1943)

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Guy de Maupassant Sur l’eau (1888)

We knew that by closing the Gulf of Aqaba it might mean war with Israel. [If war comes] it will be total and the objective will be to destroy Israel.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Lawrence Durrell

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

Georg Büchner The Hessian Courier (1834)

I am not a pacifist. That is not my attitude. But all my impressions of war are so bad that I could be for it only under the sternest necessity…

Paul von Hindenburg

In war, the poor are killed. In peace, the poor dies.

Mia Couto

Armenians have a genuine tale of woe. It largely overlaps with the tale of tragedy and suffering that can be told by Ottoman Muslims during the war years.

Bruce Fein Lies, Damn Lies, and Armenian Deaths (2009)

The humanising of war? You might as well talk about the humanizing of Hell!...... The essence of war is violence! Moderation in war is imbecility!.....

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher

They don't have to fight wars! it mmight knock some sense into therir heads if they did!

Douglas Reeman A Tradition of Victory (1981)

I say there has been a war. If a fish comes out of the water and says the crocodile has one eye, who has been there with him?

Cyprian Ekwensi Burning Grass (1962)

Wars are a summer pastime, Althalus. Politics is a year-round entertainment.

David Eddings The Redemption of Althalus (2000)

I don’t see ANY beneficiary of this crazy war! Innocent people and soldiers are dying.

Oleg Tinkov

“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”

Aminatta Forna

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