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:
War remains, as it always has been, one of the chief human mysteries.
Smooth are his words, his voice as honey sweet,
Yet war is in his heart, and dark deceit!
In the end, in every war,
whoever won, the people always lost.
Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.
Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.
Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second.