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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:

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Eric Hoffer Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

William Lloyd Garrison

We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

Samuel R. Delany Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne The American Notebooks (1835)

The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon; and when it does come my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

Stonewall Jackson

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.

Simone Weil Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)

A war is a disaster whether you win or you lose—it’s only a worse disaster if you lose.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

This increase in the world's population represents humanity's victory against death.

Julian Simon

There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.

Sydney J. Harris Pieces of Eight (1982)

Death’s but one more to-morrow.

Silas Weir Mitchell

To be dead was a state which played odd tricks on dreams of vengeance.

Tanith Lee Death's Master (1979)

I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events.

Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space (2000)

Politics is a continuation of war by different means.

Ernst Jünger Our Politicians (1925)

War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal.

John Keegan The First World War (1998)

Among man’s strange undertakings, war stood clearly forth as the strangest.

Raymond E. Feist Magician: Apprentice (1982)

The priest seems to me to be the most appropriate person to talk about death: he knows that it is not a subject for despair.

Vittorino Andreoli

Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.

Mary Oliver Winter Hours (1999)

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.

James K. Polk

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Alexander Cockburn

Resist. Come, you’re tough enough, my lady, aren’t you, if you beg for death rather than inflict evil?

Tanith Lee The Castle of Dark (1978)

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