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.
Most quoted on veterans day:
The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.
It is not an army that we must train for war; it is a nation.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing.
Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.