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:
Civil courage, in fact, can grow only out of the free responsibility of free men.
I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.
Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war; and I fear and hope, and burn and am of ice.
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
The only people who love a war are those who have never fought in one.
I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped.
To win the War, to overcome the enemy upon the fields cannot alone ensure the Victory in Peace.
You have taken from me the one privilege of civil war – the power of granting life to the defeated.
Nothing inspires more courage in a woman than fearlessness in the man she loves.