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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:

Oh, thou dread sword, oft stain'd with heroes' gore,
Thou awful terror of the prostrate Moor,
What rage could aim thee at a female breast,
Unarm'd, by softness and by love possess'd!

Luís de Camões Os Lusíadas (1572)

Folly such as yours,
Grac'd with a sword, and worthier of a fan,
Has made what enemies could ne'er have done.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Jesus

O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade;
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

You must bear your karma cheerfully, whatever it may be, taking it as an honor that Suffering comes to you, because it shows that the Lords of Karma think you worth helping. However hard it is, be thankful that it is no worse.

Jiddu Krishnamurti At the Feet of the Master (1911)

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not be forever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

William Shakespeare

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Crossing the Bar (1889)

A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history.

John F. Kennedy

Can storied urn, or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Thomas Gray Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750)

I am afraid to die sometimes, but God is the one to decide when a person dies. I want to live to the fullest until then.

Ahmad Shah Massoud

No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.

Geoffrey Blainey The Causes of War (1973)

War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force.

Geoffrey Blainey The Causes of War (1973)

Let the dead bury the dead? But, the dead can bury no one.

Alan Charles Kors Socialism's Legacy (2011)

You gotta remember that in war, you’re not deciding between the bad thing to and the good thing. You’re choosing between the bad and the worse. And you can’t control the shit that happens after you choose.

Charles E. Gannon Trial by Fire (2014)

What argufies pride and ambition?
Soon or late death will take us in tow:
Each bullet has got its commission,
And when our time's come we must go.

Charles Dibdin

The gods are on the side of the stronger.

Tacitus

God's soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so his knell is knoll'd.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

How well he fell asleep!
Like some proud river, widening toward the sea;
Calmly and grandly, silently and deep,
Life joined eternity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Ere the dolphin dies
Its hues are brightest. Like an infant's breath
Are tropic winds before the voice of death.

Fitz-Greene Halleck

Death is delightful. Death is dawn,
The waking from a weary night
Of fevers unto truth and light.

Joaquin Miller

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