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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:

Through the Spirit's action may the young people gathered here have the courage to become saints! This is what the world needs more than anything else.

Pope Benedict XVI

War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.

Rosa Luxemburg

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.

Robert Aumann War and peace (2005)

I have yet to encounter any officer here who has read an account of the Russo-Japanese War.

Chesty Puller

To move swiftly, strike vigorously, and secure all the fruits of victory is the secret of successful war.

Stonewall Jackson Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1904)

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

James Baldwin Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

That there should be wars between nations who learned their first lessons in citizenship from the same mother seems to me fratricidal insanity.

Stanley Baldwin

Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.

William Carlos Williams The Wedge (1944)

Thenceforth, the effort to abolish war seemed to me, and still seems to me, the only political object worth while.

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood A Great Experiment (1941)

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.

Henry Kissinger

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

Kenneth Clark Civilisation (1969)

But Caesar had more than a mere name and military reputation: his energy could never rest, and his one disgrace was to conquer without war.

Lucan

It is magnificent, but it is not war; it is madness.

Pierre Bosquet

He is equally great whether his theme be religion, patriotism, or love. As a political poet he is one of the greatest of all time.

Walther von der Vogelweide

There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.

John Gray The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Like dog that in the garden keepeth ward,
Eating no melons, but allowing none
To eat thereof, he is of all abhorred.

Matteo Maria Boiardo Timone (1487)

This is because all my time is taken up by the war. You should keep in mind that there are times when the rifle is more important than the pen.

Bai Chongxi

Armaments and wars, usually financed by budget deficits, are also a source of this kind of profits.

Michał Kalecki Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965)

I have the consolation to believe, that, while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.

George Washington Farewell Address (1796)

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