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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 closeness of their intercourse [the intercourse of nations] will assuredly render war as absurd and impossible by-and-by, as it would be for Manchester to fight with Birmingham, or Holborn Hill with the Strand.

Leigh Hunt

War! war! war!
Heaven aid the right!
God move the hero's arm in the fearful fight!
God send the women sleep in the long, long night,
When the breasts on whose strength they leaned shall heave no more.

Edmund Clarence Stedman Alice of Monmouth: an Idyl of the Great War (1864)

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.

J. R. R. Tolkien

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

Woodrow Wilson

Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence.

Huey P. Newton War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (1980)

War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are.

William Tecumseh Sherman Letter to James Guthrie (1864)

Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?

Leo Tolstoy

War can be and is mass murder, where the motive is wrong. It can be sacrifice and right action, where the motive is right. The slaying of a man in the act of killing the defenseless is not regarded as murder. The principle remains the same, whether it is killing an individual who is murdering, or fighting a nation which is warring on the defenseless.

Alice Bailey Treatise on the Seven Rays: Volume 1: Esoteric Psychology I (1936)

Sympathy is the softener of death, and memory of the loved and the lost is the earthly shadow of their immortality. But who turns aside amid those crowds that hurry through the thronged and noisy streets?—No one can love London better than I do; but never do I wish to be buried there. It is the best place in the world for a house, and the worst for a grave.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

First, it's important to note that rape and war didn't always go together. For instance, European colonists wrote astonished letters home about how "even these savages" -- by which they meant the residents of this continent they were invading -- didn't rape, not even their women prisoners. But those were wars of self-defense.

Gloria Steinem

And when, in the evening of life, the golden clouds rest sweetly and invitingly upon the golden mountains, and the light of heaven streams down through the gathering mists of death, I wish you a peaceful and abundant entrance into that world of blessedness, where the great riddle of life will be unfolded to you in the quick consciousness of a soul redeemed and purified.

Josiah Gilbert Holland Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

[T]hat one should never permit a disorder to persist in order to avoid war, for war is not avoided thereby but merely deferred to one's own disadvantage...

Niccolò Machiavelli

Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

John F. Kennedy

I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart, I am in possession of my arms, [4] I am in possession of my legs, at the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my body at the gates of Amenti (xxvi. 5, 6).

Annie Besant Theosophical Manual No III: Death & After (1894)

Violence against the other is, in this sense, violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.

Judith Butler

Hitler...Mussolini...and Stalin are able to show the immediate effectiveness of violence. But it will be as transitory as that of Chenghis' slaughters. But the effects of Buddha's nonviolence persist and are likely to grow with age.

Mahatma Gandhi

Tho 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the Regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

Rudyard Kipling

O Earth, so full of dreary noises!
O men, with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold, the waller's heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God makes a silence through you all,
And "giveth His beloved, sleep."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

So was she soon exhaled, and vanished hence;
As a sweet odour, of a vast expense.
She vanished, we can scarcely say she died.

John Dryden

What if thou be saint or sinner,
Crooked gray-beard, straight beginner,—
Empty paunch, or jolly dinner,
When Death thee shall call.
All alike are rich and richer,
King with crown, and cross-legged stitcher,
When the grave hides all.

Richard Watson Gilder Drinking Song, as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

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