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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:

We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. … Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.

William Lloyd Garrison

I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?

Joseph Goebbels

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.

Woodrow Wilson The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

I do not want us to fight a war that no one ever meant to begin.

Lyndon B. Johnson Control of Nuclear Weapons (1964)

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command.

Eugene V. Debs The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Therefore, as we see it, the cold war is not an attempt to change each other's systems of government, but to influence those that are uncommitted.

Walter Reuther Meeting with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev (1959)

The war in Iraq was misconceived from start to finish — if it has a finish.

George Soros Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

Agreed, reject...This is the end of negotiations with America, once and for all! If Wilson wants war, let him provoke it and then have it.

Wilhelm II, German Emperor

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.

Stendhal La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

Before war can be fought, a long series of necessary steps, which quite obviously are not and cannot be enforced steps, must be taken by the mass of men.

Norman Angell Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over.

Joe Biden

How can [Tony] Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.

David Hockney

Now with our concentrations in Sinai, the chances of war are fifty-fifty. But if we close the Strait, war will be a one hundred percent certainty.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

It was a new kind of class war — the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

Irving Kristol

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

Muriel Rukeyser The Speed of Darkness (1968)

Remember, our hearts are one. Even when we are at war with each other, our hearts are always beating in unison.

Yoko Ono

The war method includes falsehood as an integral part. Truth is indeed a casualty of war.

Kirby Page Must We Go to War? (1937)

Like concepts such as national energy policy or war on drugs, competitiveness covers a lot of territory

Allen B. Rosenstein Allen B. Rosenstein and Phillip Burgess (1988)

We are very aware that we are in the middle of a war. But we are still continuing our calm and monotonous lives.

Zabel Yesayan

The civil war in Syria is the worst humanitarian tragedy of our generation and one that our government, and the world, is failing to deal with adequately.

Jo Cox

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