Veterans Day Inspirational Quotes

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The atrocities of war are only overshadowed by the heroism of their dead.
Todd Stocker
Today, we come together to honour the brave Canadians in uniform who have served our country throughout our history. They’ve built peace. They’ve defended democracy. And they’ve enabled countless people to live in freedom – at home and around the world. Remembrance Day was first held in 1919 on the first anniversary of the armistice agreement that ended the First World War. A century later, our respect and admiration for Canada’s fallen and veterans has not wavered. We owe them and their families an immeasurable debt of gratitude. We honour all those who have served, including the many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit veterans and current service members. Today, we pay tribute to our veterans, to those who have been injured in the line of duty, and to all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. They stood for liberty, and sacrificed their future for the future of others. Their selflessness and courage continue to inspire Canadians who serve today. At 11:00 a.m., I encourage everyone to observe the two minutes of silence in recognition of the brave Canadians who fought for us. Today, we thank our service members, past and present, for all they have done to keep us and people around the world safe. They represent the very best of what it means to be Canadian. Lest we forget.
Justin Trudeau
I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Failure never crosses a victorious mind
Jamie Summerlin (Freedom Run: A 100-Day, 3,452-Mile Journey Across America to Benefit Wounded Veterans)
Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
There is also some value to inspiring a certain amount of fear in the people who work for you. When Clinton began as president, one White House veteran gave him a sage piece of advice: “Your own staff won’t take you seriously until you fire someone.” Clinton demurred, “I’m not very good at that.” He wasn’t, and it hurt him. His administration was plagued by leaks to the press. Had he made an example of even one staffer, they might have stopped, or at least slowed. In a fit of rage Clinton sometimes demanded that someone be fired. Because he didn’t have the heart to fire them himself, he’d tell a staffer to do it, but then unfire them the next day. In
John D. Gartner (In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography)
The New York Times, inspired by Doerries (2015), on Memorial Day 2017 posted a video of veterans who suffered PTSD reading Ajax’s final speech, and all of them were moved to tears (Headlam, Archdeacon & Shum 2017). Modern warriors who read classical accounts of war feel that they recognise the psychological stresses suffered by ancient warriors.
Birgit A. Olsen (Tracing the Indo-Europeans: New evidence from archaeology and historical linguistics)
We were outsider, yes, but insiders to a hard-won truth: giving your life away is the only way to truly find it. Loving our enemies is what transforms fear into freedom. Love has the power to change us. As Dr. Sabah told me that first day over tea, “when one of us is cut, we all bleed. That is humanity.
Diana Oestreich (Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First)
If you don't dream big, you'll wake up in the same place every day.
Evan F Young, President Transgender American Veterans Association
[Bernardo Ruiz] Suarez observed, “The White race is haughty and domineering everywhere. In those countries where religion, education, and other influences have softened the hearts of men, the sentiment of brotherhood tends to level the inequalities and barriers of race, and to give reality to that form of society, which in political science is called: democracy.” Suarez warned, that the United States lacked “the sentiment of brotherhood altogether.” But the race which colonized and still forms the majority of the people of the United States, with its historical antecedents and its degrading record of bloodshed, cannot be classified, in the opinion of an impartial observer, as a democratic race. The refusal of people in Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other nations to submit quietly to US power inspired African Americans trying to ward off racial capitalism’s blows in the United States throughout the 20th century. Veterans of the war on the government of American banks, would have taken exception to a later generation of scholars who characterized the United States as either isolationist or democratic. The insurgent citizenry of the Americas, who faced the colossus of the north, would have scoffed at the idea that the United States was not an empire. The opponents of the US military invasions of the early 20th century, demanded that the United States be held accountable for its overseas depredations. Instead, historians shrouded the country’s history in a veil of innocence and exceptionalism, which has undermined the nation’s ability to reform itself to this day. It cannot be said that scholars lacked sources that could have guided them to the truth. Suarez, whose nation had dealt with US power for decades, spoke for many in the Global South in 1922 when he concluded, “No matter what is said to the contrary, and there is much truth that may be said, the United States of America have by no means lived up to their professed abhorence of autocracy and aggressive imperialism in their international affairs.
Paul Ortiz (An African American and Latinx History of the United States (ReVisioning History))