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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:

The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie...

Leon Trotsky

Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can sit in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.

Nelson Mandela

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

Chris Hedges

O great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o'er-rank states, thou grand decider
Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood
The earth when it is sick, and curest the world
O' the pleurisy of people.

John Fletcher

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

The most heaven-like spots I have ever visited, have been certain rooms in which Christ's disciples were awaiting the summons of death. So far from being a "house of mourning," I have often found such a house to be a vestibule of glory.

Theodore L. Cuyler Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

In the 21st century, there is a tendency to blur the distinction between the state of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared, and once they have begun, they do not proceed according to the pattern we are accustomed to.

Valery Gerasimov

That is the way of the wickedness called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called history says. The god of War, Mars the Magnificent and Tragic, always wins.

Stephen Hunter Basil's War (2021)

Has this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings at grave-making?
Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.

William Shakespeare

Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,
And he that cares for most shall find no more.

Joseph Hall

Death and dissolution are not penalties inflicted on the living; they are themselves the conditions necessary to the existence of life and they hold all the hope of the future, as they have from the start.

N. J. Berrill You and the Universe (1958)

Fear Death? – to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face.

Robert Browning

Round, round the cypress bier
Where she lies sleeping,
On every turf a tear,
Let us go weeping!
Wail!

George Darley

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning (1946)

You must give up all feeling of possession. Karma may take from you the things which you like best — even the people whom you love most. Even then you must be cheerful — ready to part with anything and everything.

Jiddu Krishnamurti At the Feet of the Master (1911)

O Death, all eloquent! you only prove
What dust we dote on, when 'tis man we love.

Alexander Pope Eloisa to Abelard (1717)

They are not lost but sent before.

Seneca the Younger

The problem is, information degrades each time a human cell replenishes itself. Death is inherent in flesh people. It seems to be written into the basic program—a way, perhaps, of keeping the universe from filling up with old people.

Michael Swanwick

But O! for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Arques, and you were not there.

Henry IV of France

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