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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:

War is the life-element of an army.

Friedrich von Waldersee

Perhaps the most recurring and paradoxical trigger of change in human society has been war.

Linda Colley Can history help? (2018)

The Russian command knew that by winning the battle of Kursk Russia had, in effect, won the war.

Alexander Werth

Every day regiments pass by. The town is crowded with soldiers. These new ones are running in, fairly. They fear the war will be over before they get a sight of the fun.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!

Sheri S. Tepper Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996)

Let tyranny reign a single day, and there will be no more patriots the day after. Yet one or the other has to yield.

Maximilien Robespierre

I lead no armies, Warder. I command nothing save myself, and not always that.

Robert Jordan The Fires of Heaven (1993)

We have absolutely abandoned any idea of nationalist loyalty. We are deliberately putting a world order before our loyalty to our own country.

Clement Attlee

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Barbara Tuchman A Distant Mirror (1978)

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

Dan Simmons The Fall of Hyperion (1990)

War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.

Charles Sheffield Proteus Unbound (1989)

It is not easy to capture a terrorist sanctuary like this (in Mali) ... but we (Chadian armed forces) are aware that this is just one battle in the war.

Mahamat Déby Itno Mahamat Déby Itno (2013)

“It's a rough war, isn't it?”
I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”

William Tenn Of All Possible Worlds (1955)

The overwhelming majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionalists [i.e., specialists in the hadith] . . . understood the obligation of jihad in a military sense.

Bernard Lewis

CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

Arthur C. Clarke

“That was the time to begin all-out preparations for war.”
“On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war.”

Isaac Asimov The Foundation series (1951)

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

Montesquieu Lettres Persanes (1721)

Three cheers for the war. Three cheers for Italy's war and three cheers for war in general. Peace is hence absurd or rather a pause in war.

Benito Mussolini

It is by the progress of philosophy and by the spectacle of the happiness of France, that you will extend the empire of our revolution, and not by the force of arms and by the calamities of war.

Maximilien Robespierre

If the Lord sends us war, we have got to face it like men, but God forbid we should manufacture war, and use it as an escape from our domestic difficulties. You can't expect a blessing on that.

John Buchan The Path of the King (1921)

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