Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?
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 Services in war time are fit only for desperadoes but, in peace, are fit only for fools.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
War is a man’s game—the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.
"Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men."
It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.
Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.
In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.