Skip to content

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:

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

G. K. Chesterton The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)

War was a get-together of the vain.

Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Go back, go back, you silly bastards. This ain't our kind of war. This one is for the birds.

Bill Downs

I based the choreography I did for WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS on the techniques of professional wrestlers. I think it turned out very well.

Haruo Nakajima Haruo Nakajima Interview" , Kaiju Conversations (1995)

If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war.

Maxine Hong Kingston

"I always wanted to paint. Always, before the war, that is. But I was thirteen then." ("Splinter")

Ida Fink A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1985)

of an event is unlikely to be interesting after it and this may be the reason why my prophetic utterances regarding the Great War took the form of Satire.

Gilbert Cannan

We are saying — as war veterans — enough is enough. You have shown that you have failed. It can’t get any worse

Blessed Runesu Geza

I feel that on account of ... countless war widows and orphans ... I should waive collection of a pension.

Aurora Quezon

the need to reduce the fears, tensions and presssures of war.

Lloyd (Bud) Winter Relax and Win (1981)

FoxNews hates the #SyriaWithdrawal. So does #MSNBC and #CNN. So both parties, cable networks and weapons makers all agree. No wonder our wars never end.

Medea Benjamin

Index entry, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948)

Winston Churchill The Second World War (book series) (1948)

War as I knew it (1947), as cited in Oxford Essential Quotations (4th ed.), By Susan Ratcliffe.

George S. Patton

I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried (1990)

I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried (1990)

I'm sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war.

Susan Sontag Salon interview (2001)

The guy's a war hero. He's not a coward like George Bush. He didn't duck into a Champagne unit in the Texas Air National Guard and disappear like George Bush.

Mike Malloy

Well, it was war - I could not have carried on as an administrative officer if I had let myself be swayed emotionally by my feelings.

Oswald Pohl

Tolstoy's War and Peace is overblown – do yourself a favour and read his Death of Ivan Ilych.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh Interview by Tom Vowler (2010)

That's the only way you can stop war, stop participating in it, and stop so much consumption that requires war, at least that's the way I look at it.

Juanita Morrow Nelson

Related topics