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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:

Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

John F. Kennedy

For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck 'im out, the brute!"
But it's "Savior of 'is country," when the guns begin to shoot.

Rudyard Kipling

[Deprogramming survivor Toru Goto] teaches us that resilience is not a trait, but a choice. That faith is not weakness, but armor. That freedom is not always granted—sometimes, it must be reclaimed.

Massimo Introvigne

Can any thing be more ridiculous, than that a man has a right to kill me, because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his prince has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him.

Blaise Pascal

Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife, and carnage drear,
Of Flodden's fatal field,
When shiver'd was fair Scotland's spear,
And broken was her shield!

Walter Scott Marmion (1808)

I have heard something said about allegiance to the South: I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance.

Henry Clay the U.S. Senate (1848)

A sigh is the Sword of an Angel King.

William Blake

A navy is essentially and necessarily aristocratic. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending they can never be practically applied or even admitted on board ship, out of port, or off soundings. This may seem a hardship, but it is nevertheless the simplest of truths. Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human rights and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism.

John Paul Jones

There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country. This generous and public-spirited Passion has been observed of late Years to languish and grow cold in this our Island; where a Party of Men have made it their Business to represent it as chimerical and romantic, to destroy in the Minds of the People the Sense of national Glory, and to turn into Ridicule our natural and ancient Allies, who are united to us by the common interests both of Religion and Policy.

Joseph Addison The free-holder: or political essays (1716)

I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?

Grace Paley Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.

James Monroe The Monroe Doctrine (1823)

Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

Ernst Röhm

Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.

Mark Riebling Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

(…) when a man is fearless, no man can stand against him in battle – either a battle in material life or in spiritual life. He is victorious in all battles of life.

Haidakhan Babaji

War is a class conflict, too. The rich and powerful who open war escape the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their children sent into the jaws of violence. It is often the vulnerable, the poor, & working people -who had little to no say in conflict - who pay the price.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them.

Jonah Goldberg

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbours. The citizen of the universe would the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.

Voltaire

O friends, be men; so act that none may feel
Ashamed to meet the eyes of other men.
Think each one of his children and his wife,
His home, his parents, living yet or dead.
For them, the absent ones, I supplicate,
And bid you rally here, and scorn to fly.

Homer

God himself favors the brave.

Ovid

Come you masters of war,/You that build all the guns,/You that build the death planes,/You that build the big bombs,/You that hide behind walls,/You that hide behind desks,/I just want you to know,/I can see through your masks.

Bob Dylan

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