Remembrance Day 2024: War quotes to celebrate Armistice Day

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them,” Laurence Binyon wrote. 

His words in his poem For the Fallen have become timeless and are read every year on Remembrance Sunday as Britain comes together to pay respect to all those who have died in conflict since the First World War. 

Now, 106 years after World War One ended, those words still hold power today while reminding people about the lives sacrificed for peace.

The first Armistice Day was observed on November 11, 1919, to mark the first anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Remembrance Sunday has been held ever since on the nearest Sunday to November 11, which this year will take place on November 10, 2024.

Britons are wearing red, white, purple, and black poppies this week as a tribute to the fallen as we gear up for the 2024 Remembrance Sunday events nationwide.

Veterans, leaders, and civilians will then gather at the Cenotaph to pay tribute in the annual Armistice Day commemoration, while other events will take place across the country.

On Armistice Day, a two-minute silence will be held across the country and in Commonwealth nations to remember those in our armed forces that sacrificed their lives.

If you attend events or watch any on television, you will likely hear Binyon’s words on Sunday and Monday, but what other quotes have been associated with Remembrance Sunday? 

Published in 1915 after the end of the First World War, this poem by John McCrae was first published in Punch. 

The poem is better known in the US, where it is read on Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

Written by James Edmonds in 1919, these lines were part of a series of epitaphs commemorating those who died in World War One.

It’s now more famously known as the Kohima epitaph, as it’s inscribed on a memorial in the small town in north-east India that saw some of the bloodiest conflicts in the East during the Second World War.

It’s often recited on Remembrance Day to pay tribute, particularly to soldiers from South Asian nations like the Gurkhas, who fought alongside British soldiers in both world wars.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he said in 1940 after the Battle of Britain. 

A year later he gave another famous speech at Harrow School. “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Written in 1933, Dylan Thomas’s poem describes the impact of war and its consequences. 

The title comes from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. 

“Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.”

Laurence Binyon’s poem was first published by The Times in 1914 and is seven stanzas long, with usually just the fourth now being repeated. The words have come to symbolise all casualties of war. 

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.”

Written by Irish poet WB Yeats in 1918, this poem highlights the contribution made by Irish soldiers fighting for Britain during the Great War, during a period when they were also trying to establish independence for Ireland.

“I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.”

Wilfred Owen is widely regarded as one of the best poets of the First World War, often depicting the conflict in its true horror.

Owen himself died in action on November 4, 1918, almost exactly a week before the Armistice was signed, with much of his work being published posthumously after the war was over.

“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

“How important it is for us to recognise and celebrate our heroes and she-roes,” US poet Maya Angelou is credited with saying. 

“We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who, without knowing our names or recognising our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must say thank you.”

And to finish off, this is a call from Nelson Mandela.

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

The South African leader is credited with these words in a speech in the early 1990s.