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Veterans Day Quotes

Nothing on this page was written for Veterans Day. It is built from four pages, War, Courage, Patriotism and Gratitude, and the mix is not tidy. The war page contains plenty of writers who hated it, and the patriotism page contains Bertrand Russell remarking in 1962 that patriots talk of dying for their country and never of killing for it.

That makes the page more honest than a greeting card and less convenient. If you need a line of thanks, the gratitude entries are the safest place to look. If you want something that sounds like a speech, read the notes first, because some of the best-known patriotic lines here are flagged as misattributed.

Random quote on Veterans Day

Most quoted on veterans day:

I'd say they started something at Pearl Harbor that they are not going to finish. We are going to win this war.

Ernest King

There has never been anything great done in the world except through the courage and resolve of one man who defies the prejudices of the multitude.

François-Noël Babeuf

The Rhineland liberated from Prussia or eternal war. The choice is ours.

Jacques Bainville

This isn't your war... It’s Putin’s war for power and money.

Boris Nemtsov

The Prophet, moreover, has said we are directed to make war upon men only until such time as they shall confess, ‘There is no God but one God.’

Thomas Hughes

There may be no other Lebanese but you who wants civil war in Lebanon. Do not threaten us with war.

Boutros Gemayel

the issue of war and peace remains fundamentally the issue of whether or not one is going to be willing to respect one’s fellow man.

Barbara Deming Southern Peace Walk Two Issues or One? (1961)

Indeed, if Boris Johnson does the only thing he can feasibly do and resign, the big risk is that the Conservatives will tip back into civil war.

Sherelle Jacobs

The holy fool who’d dragged the solar system into war and seemed utterly blind to the damage he caused. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was.

James S. A. Corey Caliban's War (2012)

It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.

Stephen Leacock Literary Lapses (1910)

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

Albert Camus A Happy Death (written 1936-38 (1971)

The motto must be, "Never war again."

Adolf Hitler

War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future.

Richard Nixon Real Peace (1983)

Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.

Larry Niven Tales of Known Space (1975)

“Well, who begun it?”
That's what at the end of a war
We always say not who won it,
Or what it was foughten for.

Robert Frost In the Clearing (1962)

I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

Ronald Reagan

The verse adorn again
Fierce War, and faithful Love,
And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest.

Thomas Gray The Bard (1757)

Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.

Ernest Hemingway

Il y a une sorte de plaisir attaché au courage qui se met au-dessus de la fortune. Mépriser l'argent, c'est détrôner un Roi. Il y a du ragoût.

Nicolas Chamfort

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

George Santayana Persons and Places (1944)

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