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:
Love calls to war;
Sighs his alarms,
Lips his swords are,
The field his arms.
It takes all nations to keep the peace, but it only takes one to start a war.
If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgment.
They are the most insidious propagandists ever to cloak self-serving greed with pseudo-patriotism.
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.
They [photographs of war victims] create the illusion of consensus.
Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.