National Mourning Quotes

Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.

Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls showed that millions of Americans took his assassination like a 'death in the family.'

September 11th was a moment when America had the sympathy of the world.

When the family dies, the nation follows.

I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say: September 11th we are all Americans - in grief, as in defiance.

... dizzy with the elevation to which the assassination [of Lincoln] has raised him.

Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou? Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead? Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low Some less majestic, less beloved head?

It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.

I believe every citizen feels the same way about the Sewol Ferry incident.

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

[On President Kennedy's assassination Nov. 22, 1963:] Something dreadful is going to happen to the president today.

I think Kennedy being assassinated changed the world. That shot changed everything about America, and made us cynical, made people discontent and angry.

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

One morning every spring, for exactly two minutes, Israel comes to a stop. Pedestrians stand in place, drivers pull over to the side of the road, and nobody speaks, sings, eats, or drinks as the nation pays respect to the victims of the Nazi genocide. From the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, the only sounds one hears are sirens.

Kennedy had been assassinated a month or so before. So we walked to the grave of John Kennedy and ended our walking symbolically at the Arlington National Cemetery.

I don't want to be callous about it, but we all seemed to get over the Oklahoma bombing pretty quickly, and we're never going to get over 9/11.

A president can't go to every memorial service.

The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.

When 9/11 happened, the world, certainly in the United States of America, there was a unity. There was this sense of unity. And I have to say just from a personal level, it really felt good. We all felt the same way.

The terrible attack in Manhattan has given place to a burst of patriotism in the United States.

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it.

Certainly the Australians were buried in Korea. But I think that from Vietnam on, all the killed were brought home to America or to Australia, in our case.

With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.

America’s last hero is dead.

I think of events like the Challenger and 9/11 - events that move us so much that we never quite get over them. So it's important to go back and relive those feelings in order to remember how important those events were to us.