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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:

"Go, with a song of peace," said Fingal; "go, Ullin, to the king of swords. Tell him that we are mighty in war; that the ghosts of our foes are many."

James Macpherson

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. You cannot subjugate a nation forcibly unless you wipe out every man, woman, and child. Unless you wish to use such drastic measures, you must find a way of settling your disputes without resort to arms.

Albert Einstein

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)

I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.

Will Rogers

But God, who is able to prevail, wrestled with him, as the Angel did with Jacob, and marked him; marked him for his own; marked him with a blessing, a blessing of obedience to the motions of his blessed Spirit.

Izaak Walton Life of Donne (1640)

Now in war we are confronted with conditions which are strange
If we accept them we will never win.
Since being realistic, as in mundane combats fistic
We will get a bloody nose and that's a sin.

George S. Patton

War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise...

Victor Davis Hanson A War Like No Other - How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (2005)

Much of the sanctimonious abhorrence displayed by the ruling class and its apologists against the use of violence in the class struggle is rooted in the desire to maintain the integrity of its class monopoly of violence.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The Pale Blue Dot (photograph) is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter-to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.

Ann Druyan Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020)

Is it then so sad a thing to die?

Virgil Aeneid (-19)

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?

Seneca the Younger

"People can't die, along the coast," said Mr. Peggotty, "except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He's a-going out with the tide."

Charles Dickens

The babe is at peace within the womb,
The corpse is at rest within the tomb.
We begin in what we end.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death where is thy sting, O Grave where is thy victory?

Paul of Tarsus

Here indeed I am; this is my position.

Horace

The English took the eagle and Austrians the eaglet.

Victor Hugo

I seriously doubt if we will ever have another war. This is probably the very last one.

Richard Nixon

O, thy vile lady!
She has robbed me of my sword.

William Shakespeare

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

Plato

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

John Donne Poems (1633)

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