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.
Generals do not always run wars the way they would like to, nor the troops under them.
War remains, as it always has been, one of the chief human mysteries.
Smooth are his words, his voice as honey sweet,
Yet war is in his heart, and dark deceit!
In the end, in every war,
whoever won, the people always lost.
Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.
Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.
Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second.