Death takes the mean man with the proud;
The fatal urn has room for all.
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.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
The only certainty in war is human suffering, uncertain costs, unintended consequences.
Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.
Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.