Skip to content

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:

In a world of danger and trial, peace is our deepest aspiration, and when peace comes we will gladly convert not our swords into plowshares, but our bombs into peaceful reactors, and our planes into space vessels. "Pursue peace," the Bible tells us, and we shall pursue it with every effort and every energy that we possess. But it is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

John F. Kennedy

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1898)

All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention of man, but in the intention of Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the dismemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.

Immanuel Kant Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, 'To Him we shall return.'

Rumi

The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation—the great peaks of honour we had forgotten—Duty, Patriotism, and—clad in glittering white—the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven.

David Lloyd George

We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermits, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.

Robert Sapolsky The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)

Everyone acknowledges that people come to the evidence with different preconceptions. But we can't go into these problems assuming that the civilian bias, which tends toward arms control, and the view that everyone is rational, is necessarily more appropriate than the military bias. That needs to be argued, not just assumed.

Mark Riebling Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

The general belief in Reincarnation is enough to prove that the religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a passage from the Ordinances of Manu, following on a disquisition on metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance from rebirths.

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

War has been the excuse people have made throughout history to take something away from others that didn't belong to them. And it's a never ending cycle. First one group takes away something from the other, then the other wants to take it back, only if they succeed, they take much more. And then it starts all over again. War is caused by greed.

László Széchenyi

While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.

Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Out of the strain of the Doing,
Into the peace of the Done;
Out of the thirst of Pursuing,
Into the rapture of Won.
Out of gray mist into brightness,
Out of pale dusk into dawn,—
Out of all wrong—into rightness,
We from these fields shall be gone.
"Nay," say the saints," not gone, but come,
Into eternity's Harvest-Home!"

Julia L. M. Woodruff

Violent interactions are difficult because they go against the grain of normal interaction rituals. The tendency to become entrained in each other’s rhythms and emotions means that when the interaction is at cross-purposes—an antagonistic interaction—people experience a pervasive feeling of tension . . . [A]t higher levels of intensity . . . [this tension] shades over into fear.

Randall Collins Violence (2008)

"Come and see how a Christian can die," said the dying sage to his pupil; how would it do to say, "Come and see how an infidel can die?" How would it have done for Voltaire to say this, who, in his panic at the prospect of eternity, offered his physician half his fortune for six weeks more of life?

James Hamilton Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

God has chosen little nations as the vessels by which He carries His choicest wines to the lips of humanity to rejoice their hearts, to exalt their vision, to strengthen their faith, and if we had stood by when two little nations (Belgium and Servia) were being crushed and broken by the brutal hands of barbarians, our shame would have rung down the everlasting ages.

David Lloyd George

We had nae heed for the parish bell,
But still—when the bugle cried,
We went for you to Neuve Chapelle,
We went for you to the yetts o' Hell,
And there for you we died!

Neil Munro Roving Lads (1915)

Deucalion next—he lanced his arm with a bronze-shod spear,
he spitted the Trojan through where the elbow-tendons grip
and there he stood, waiting Achilles, arm dangling heavy,
staring death in the face—and Achilles chopped his neck
and his sword sent head and helmet flying off together
and marrow bubbling up from the clean-cut neckbone.

Homer

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

Norman Mailer

Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

Arthur C. Clarke

Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

Arthur Miller After the Fall (1964)

Related topics