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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:

Defense is the first act of war.

Byron Katie

War is not high ideals. War is not noble objectives. War is not gallant heroism. War is not sacrificial devotion.

Kirby Page Must We Go to War? (1937)

Ward: Abba Poemen said, "Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart."

Poemen

A war is completely unavoidable.

Margarita Simonyan

I am opposed to dividing them in times of peace into racial or religious groupings, as I am opposed to so dividing them in times of war.

Dennis Chávez

Being from the “Star Wars” generation, trilogies are important to me.

Liniers Interview (2021)

...War in Spain remains ‘unfinished business’, and not only inside Spain itself, but across Europe, and in Britain too.

Helen Graham

Being in the army,we should pray more that they should stop the war because it was not going to help us and it did not help us.

Josephine Okwuekeleke Tolefe

The wars of independence that were fought throughout the African continent and the world beyond the African continent were linked.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò Interview with Democracy Now (2023)

Satisfied, filled with the warmth of the bright sun, the birds were singing cheerfully, oblivious of the war taking over the world. ("Blitz")

Esther Kreitman Yikhes (1949)

I believe that backfired and helped me immensely, that and the fact that I worked harder, rang more doorbells and visited more homes in the ward.

Joan Barr

"Building is harder than war."

Ahmed al-Sharaa

For my mother, the lingering pain of that war was waking up and finding that the shrines had been systematically looted.

Chika Okeke-Agulu

But I am not a painter of war; I was just painting at a time when there was a war

Aboudia

War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed — that is, in the infantry — and it is extremely unpleasant.

Paul Fussell Humanities interview (1996)

After the 2nd World War, the Philippines had the second highest per capita GDP in Asia. Today, we have one of the lowest.

Francis Escudero

[...] In real war an officer may have only one chance at succeeding. Consider each problem.

David Gemmell

During the British rule the war was only at the political level. Now, the war descends to a personal level, that is the difference.

Ramnath Goenka

The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans... in a series of wars... conquered large parts of Asia.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Zikora (2020)

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