The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.

– James A. Garfield, Arlington (1868)

Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death—of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

– John 15:13 (KJV)

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt, D-Day prayer (1944)

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung.

– James A. Garfield, Arlington (1868)

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens.

– James A. Garfield, Arlington (1868)

Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

Any Memorial Day of this sort is, of course, a day touched with sorrowful memory, and yet I for one do not see how we can have any thoughts of pity for the men whose memory we honor to-day. I do not pity them. I envy them, rather, because theirs is the great work for liberty accomplished.

– Woodrow Wilson, Memorial Day at Arlington (1917)

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.

– Woodrow Wilson, Memorial Day at Arlington (1914)

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, / But I saw they were not as was thought, / They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not.

– Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Every year—in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life—there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

As surely as this day comes round we are in the presence of the dead. For one hour, twice a year at least ... the dead come back and live with us.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

Let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill of Rights Day proclamation (1941)

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.

– Woodrow Wilson, Memorial Day at Arlington (1914)

That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost; that the characters of men are molded and inspired by what their fathers have done.

– James A. Garfield, Arlington (1868)

To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

In the great democracy of self-devotion private and general stand side by side. Unmarshalled save by their own deeds, the army of the dead sweep before us, "wearing their wounds like stars."

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1884)

Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners.

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes?

– John A. Logan, General Orders No. 11 (1868)

Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it and sacrifice for it.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt