Famous Quotes & Sayings

John McCain

I say to our enemies: We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won't

John McCain

We send cruise missiles and then we think everything's all right or we try to bring them to trial. My friends, this time they've gone too far. This time we're serious. This time we won't quit until they are gone, completely gone from the face of the earth

Benjamin Disraeli

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

Elbert Hubbard

Freedom cannot be bestowed - it must be achieved.

Ernest Hemingway

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

James Cromwell

I play an 89-year-old man whose wife has Alzheimer's in a movie called 'Still.' I play a World War II veteran, I acted with my son and it's called 'Memorial Day.'

James Gates Percival

Green sods are all their monument; and yet it tells A nobler history than pillared piles, Or the eternal pyramids.

George William Curtis

Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.

James Carafano

Sometimes the enormity of war overwhelms the truth that all great struggles are just the sum of individual stories. Each is more than just the story of one soldier's service and sacrifice. Their service ripples across their families, friends and their communities. Memorial Day reminds us it is the noble sacrifice of many that makes us who we are.

Jack Straw

Holocaust Memorial Day is intended as an inclusive commemoration of all the individuals and communities who suffered as a result of the Holocaust - not only Jews, but also Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, political prisoners and dozens of ethnic and other minorities.

George Washington

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

George Washington

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

George Orwell

All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

George W. Bush

Their sacrifice was great, but not in vain. All Americans and every free nation on earth can trace their liberty to the white markers of places like Arlington National Cemetery. And may God keep us ever grateful.

George W. Bush

Looking across this field, we see the scale of heroism and sacrifice. All who are buried here understood their duty. All stood to protect America. And all carried with them memories of a family that they hoped to keep safe by their sacrifice.

Francis Marion Crawford

They fell, but o'er their glorious grave Floats free the banner of the cause they died to save.

Howard Zinn

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

Howard Zinn

Memorial Day will be celebrated ... by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

Gale Harold

Don't forget who your heroes are, what they mean to you, and why they mean that to you.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Fred Rogers

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

Eric Burdon

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Herbert Croly

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.

Herbert Hoover

It was the transcendent fortitude and steadfastness of these men who in adversity and in suffering through the darkest hour of our history held faithful to an ideal. Here men endured that a nation might live.

Lucy Larcom

Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty!

Paul Tsongas

America is hope. It is compassion. It is excellence. It is valor.

Pink

I dedicate my love and whole heart this Memorial Day to my Dad, a soldier, who like many others, suffers in silence with pride and honor.

John Conyers

We should not take a Memorial Day recess until we pass a proper memorial for the slain students in Littleton, Colorado, and other school gun tragedies.

John M. McHugh

As America celebrates Memorial Day, we pay tribute to those who have given their lives in our nation's wars.

John Linder

While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation, one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan.

Judith Martin

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, you may wear white shoes. Not before and not after. As a command, the White Shoe Edict should be clear and simple enough. Do not violate it. In a society in which everything else has become relative, a matter of how it makes you feel, a question between you and your conscience, and an opportunity for you to be really you, this is an absolute.

Joshua Chamberlain

Those who will may raise monuments of marble to perpetuate the fame of heroes. Those who will may build memorial halls to remind those who shall gather there in after times what manhood could do and dare for right, and what high examples of virtue and valor have gone before them. But let us make our offering to the ever-living soul. Let us build our benefactions in the ever-growing heart, that they shall live and rise and spread in blessing beyond our sight, beyond the ken of man and beyond the touch of time.

Joshua Chamberlain

Heroism is latent in every human soul - However humble or unknown, they (the veterans) have renounced what are accounted pleasures and cheerfully undertaken all the self-denials - privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life-long hurts and losses, death itself - for some great good, dimly seen but dearly held.