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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:

Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife, and carnage drear,
Of Flodden's fatal field,
When shiver'd was fair Scotland's spear,
And broken was her shield!

Walter Scott Marmion (1808)

A sigh is the Sword of an Angel King.

William Blake

A navy is essentially and necessarily aristocratic. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending they can never be practically applied or even admitted on board ship, out of port, or off soundings. This may seem a hardship, but it is nevertheless the simplest of truths. Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human rights and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism.

John Paul Jones

I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?

Grace Paley Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.

James Monroe The Monroe Doctrine (1823)

Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

Ernst Röhm

Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.

Mark Riebling Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

War is a class conflict, too. The rich and powerful who open war escape the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their children sent into the jaws of violence. It is often the vulnerable, the poor, & working people -who had little to no say in conflict - who pay the price.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them.

Jonah Goldberg

When I hear it contended that the least sensitive are, on the whole, the most happy, I recall the Indian proverb: “It’s better to sit than to stand, it is better lie down than to sit, but death is best of all.”

Nicolas Chamfort

The living wander away, we don't hear from them for months, years—but the dead move in with us to stay. They exhort us to greater faithfulness, forgive us our inertia, comfort us in our agitation.

Garrison Keillor

Philosophy first commands us to have death ever before our eyes, to anticipate it and consider it beforehand, and then she gives us rules and caveats in order to forestall our being hurt by our reflections!

Michel de Montaigne

Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints.

Blaise Pascal Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Come you masters of war,/You that build all the guns,/You that build the death planes,/You that build the big bombs,/You that hide behind walls,/You that hide behind desks,/I just want you to know,/I can see through your masks.

Bob Dylan

(Slaughter) means blood and iron.

Quintilian

War was a kind of poverty with bullets.

Bruce Sterling Join the Navy and See the Worlds (2009)

You have laid upon me this double obligation: "we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep us out of war, but we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the nation unstained."

Woodrow Wilson

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war—and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

John F. Kennedy

When earth as if on evil dreams
Looks back upon her wars,
And the white light of Christ outstreams
From the red disc of Mars,
His fame, who led the stormy van
Of battle, well may cease;
But never that which crowns the man
Whose victory was peace.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Any man who sees Europe now must realize that victory in a great war is not something you win once and for all, like victory in a ball game. Victory in a great war is something that must be won and kept won.

Harry S. Truman Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)

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