War Remembrance Quotes

Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.

I was filming a movie in London, and I drove through Ireland. It was quite beautiful, and the countryside was really remarkable. The contrast between the countryside and Ireland, and the murals there, with Northern Ireland still being a part of the United Kingdom, there's just a stark contrast in those two things. And I found that the art that came out of the conflict was really spectacular because it was about remembering either events or points of view for local neighborhoods, or the rallying cries of one side against the other.

Peace is the real and right memorial for those who have died in war.

The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was 'Remember Pearl Harbor, never again.' We need to keep that to mind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

There are too many war museums.

At the New York Harvard Club, they've moved the memorial for those who died in World Wars I and II up to an obscure little hallway; they used to be in the main hall, in the most prominent location. The sacrifice of those young people I always found so stunning and so admirable.

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing."

France will never forget the men who agreed to make the supreme sacrifice to liberate our soil, our country, our continent from the yoke of Nazi barbarity. It will never forget what it owes America, our eternal friend. Our two peoples have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the brotherhood of blood spilled.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.

I remember saying that wars must not be glorified, but wars must be remembered.

We will never forget those like my great-grandfather who fought at Vicksburg.

I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you'd seen, flickering, in black and white.

I paid a visit to Yasukuni Shrine to pray for the souls of those who had fought for the country and made ultimate sacrifices. I have made a pledge never to wage war again, that we must build a world that is free from the sufferings of the devastation of war.

I celebrate those who wear their red poppies with pride.

Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.

Go to a nearby military cemetery and look at the American flags stuck on each grave and think of the person buried there who was killed for global domination or for the blunders and egomania of our leadership. And remember, for every person buried there, 10 more loved that person and were shattered by the loss. Instead of saluting, softly say: 'I'm sorry.' ... We need to make Memorial Day a relic of the past.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments to unveil.

Many of the best films made about war have come out after the wars have ended. People need a period of time to reflect on them.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.