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.
O, sir! the good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
When discord dreadful bursts her brazen bars,
And shatters locks to thunder forth her wars.
There's a beast in every man. And it awakens when you put a sword in his hand.
I will not fight with a pole, like a northern man. I’ll slash, I’ll do it by the sword.