Memorial Day Quotes and Sayings

On Memorial Day, we commemorate the  soldiers who sacrificed their lives in battles to win or preserve our freedom. Many of them were young men and women who did not live long enough to fully experience the privileges that they fought to sustain. Use these Memorial Day quotes and sayings to honor their sacrifice. Francis A. Walker: We come, not to mourn our dead soldiers, but to praise them. Francis Marion Crawford: They fell, but oer their glorious grave floats free the banner of the cause they died to save. Daniel Webster: Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored. Lucy Larcom: Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty! Marcus Garvey: Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: And each man stand with his face in the light of his own drawn sword. Ready to do what a hero can. George F. Kennan: Heroism ... is endurance for one moment more. George Henry Boker: Fold him in his countrys stars. Roll the drum and fire the volley! What to him are all our wars, what but death be mocking folly? Benjamin Harrison: I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day. I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak because of those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it. We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did. James A. Garfield: For love of country, they accepted death. Omar Bradley: Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death. Philip Freneau: But fame is theirs — and future days. On pillard brass shall tell their praise Lise Hand: Thats what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end. Louis Pasteur: It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes. James Gates Percival: Green sods are all their monuments, and yet it tells a nobler history than pillared piles or the eternal pyramids. Albert Einstein: So long as there are men there will be wars. Joshua Lawrence 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 self-denials; privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life-long hurts and losses, death itself? For some great good, dimly seen but dearly held.