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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’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin.

William Shakespeare

The sword is out
That must destroy thee.

William Shakespeare

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

William Shakespeare

What mean these masterless and gory swords
To lie discolour'd by this place of peace?

William Shakespeare

For to me every sort of peace with the citizens seemed to be of more service than civil war.

Cicero

That it should hold companionship in peace
With honour, as in war; since that to both
It stands in like request.

William Shakespeare

To reap the harvest of perpetual peace,
By this one bloody trial of sharp war.

William Shakespeare Richard III (1591)

Without promoting fraternity, our democracy cannot survive. And the dangerous demonisation of minorities has to be countered, as it is this hate which gets transformed into intense violence.

Ram Puniyani

Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.

Maya Angelou

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist (1891)

Oh man, at that end not much has been left of your excellence, nothing of all that you have been boasting about through life - only sex, fear, self-admiration and a few other things you are usually ashamed of.

Karel Čapek

Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite.

Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France (1796)

To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence.

Nissim Mannathukkaren

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.

William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay;
And if in death still lovely, lovelier there;
Far lovelier! pity swells the tide of love.

Edward Young Night-Thoughts (1742)

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it.

James Madison

The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human.

Jawaharlal Nehru The Discovery of India (1946)

I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash — and it may be well that we become so hardened.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Peace is far more preferable to war.… I believe that peace is the only path to true security. … And there is no question that the only path to peace is through negotiations.

Barack Obama

Peace without Justice is a low estate,—
A coward cringing to an iron Fate!
But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,—
We'll pay the price of war to make it real.

Henry van Dyke

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