Happy Memorial Day

• • "I'm well and strong and young -- young enough to go to the front. If I can't be a soldier, I'll help a soldier." -- Clara Barton, founder of the American National Red Cross
• • "It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or the wage earner, the farmer or the shopkeeper, the trainman ... to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forgo extra profits to work longer or harder at the task for which he is best fitted. Rather it is a privilege." -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for shared sacrifice during World War II
• • "We've paid no price and have accepted (political) leadership that's demanded nothing of us, and we've demanded nothing of them. We've been moral defectors and have repealed one of the greatest American values. In wartime, war demands equality of sacrifice." -- Mark Shields, former Marine and political commentator, describing the average American's lack of sacrifice during the Iraq War
• • "People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents. Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothing. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort of, "don't worry your pretty little head about it." -- Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
• • "Memorial Day is about remembering. It's about remembering those who died for our country; but it's also about remembering why they believed it was worth dying for. Too many Americans, though, have never been taught our own history and heritage. How can you remember something that you've never learned?" -- Fred Thompson, former U.S. senator from Tennessee
• • "The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life." --- President Theodore Roosevelt
• "No soldier starts a war -- they only give their lives to it. Wars are started by you and me, by bankers and politicians, excitable women, newspaper editors, clergymen who are ex-pacifists and Congressmen with vertebrae of putty. The youngsters yelling in the streets, poor kids, are the ones who pay the price." -- Father Francis P. Duffy, New York City priest and famous battlefield chaplain of World War I, in a sermon at the 1931 funeral of French Army commander Marshal Joffre