Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well." -- Jennifer M. Granholm

"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle." -- General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., 1991-03-15 (interviewed by Barbara Walters)

"Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so." -- G. K. Chesterton (b. 1874-05-29, d. 1936-06-14), Orthodoxy, 1908 (emphasis added to tag the part most often quoted)

[Wishing a meaningful Memorial Day to my fellow Americans treating it as a solemn occasion to honour those who died serving our country, and a fun day off to me fellow Americans who just look at it as the start of summer.]