While there are towns and cities still planning Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some think the day is for honoring anyone who has died, not just those fallen in service to our country.
True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.
The best road to progress is freedom's road.
If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.
Ah! never shall the land forget.
In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. There's something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them.
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.
They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall with our English dead.
The United States and the freedom for which it stands, the freedom for which they died, must endure and prosper. Their lives remind us that freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden. And just as they whom we commemorate were willing to sacrifice, so too must we - in a less final, less heroic way - be willing to give of ourselves.
Patriotism was a living fire of unquestioned belief and purpose.
What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them.
Some of the shells brought my heart into my mouth; lying there waiting for them was intolerable. I was sure I was going to be blown to pieces.
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.
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.
To our Soldiers: Thank you again and again, you will always matter, not only on this Memorial Day but every day!
Your silent tents of green We deck with fragrant flowers; Yours has the suffering been, The memory shall be ours.
Real heroes are men who fall and fail and are flawed, but win out in the end because they've stayed true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments.
Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.
The hero dead cannot expire: The dead still play their part.