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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:

there is no war not based on lies,
there is no infamy alive without
its kindred kin, deceit.

L. Ron Hubbard

I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.

Fredric Brown The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)

The misappropriation of resources provided by the government for weapons means the Nigerian military is unable to beat Boko Haram.

Muhammadu Buhari

What should I do and where should I go?
A thief has taken hold of my flesh!
For there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,
and wherever I turn, there too will be Death.

Gilgamesh

When you're dead you're dead.

Kurt Vonnegut Mother Night (1962)

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

The village idiots in her bed
Never cared that her eyes were red
Never cared that her brain was dead.
In the hours that her face was alive
It was a thing just to be by her side.

Edie Brickell Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (1988)

Death is an eternal sleep.

Joseph Fouché

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.

Ted Hughes Crow (1970)

It is in the present state of physics impossible to conceive of a physically dead world, that is to say, a world without any available source of energy.

Frederick Soddy Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

He (Sri Aurobindo) did not keep me, what could I do? I had to go. But I left my psychic being with him, and in France I was once on the point of death: the doctors had given me Up.

Mirra Alfassa

He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; He will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence.

Apuleius

The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and unjust exploitation.

Martin Luther King Jr. Strength to Love (1963)

I believe in Jesus
An' what the Bible said
An' I am fairly certain
He had himself a heavy head. He scared the lyin' people
So bad, they hung him dead
An' they never even listened
To what he really said.

Hoyt Axton Joy To The World (1971)

[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.

Paul Auster Oracle Night (2003)

They are only deceitful words that make a mockery of justice when a judicial system detains, convicts and punishes people according to the biased and malicious opinions of security-military agencies and denies prisoners their legal rights.

Narges Mohammadi

This service of civilization is our true work; the occupation that gives meaning to life. We need peace, inward and outward, because peace leaves us free to attend to it; while war—or, indeed, any violent hatred—interrupts and wrecks and perverts.

Gilbert Murray The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929)

On one side is the call of Christ, on the other is death,
We are caught in a conflict, hard to resolve.
Having received many a wound, for more of wounds he craves,
Mark the courage of helpless Bismil, how he suffers unfazed!

Ram Prasad Bismil

It was Putin who chose this war (2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine), not the Russian people, so we must see clearly that this is Putin's war.

Olaf Scholz

We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.

Arthur C. Clarke Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

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