Top 100 Quotes About Vietnam
#1. Moms and daughters can negotiate over anything, and they can go on longer than it took to settle the Vietnam War.
Steve Schirripa
#2. I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
George Packer
#3. It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.
Ronald Reagan
#4. I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.
Michael McCormick
#5. The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.
Bob Simon
#6. CBS News on Tuesday had Bob Kerrey in a Vietnam scandal, Senator Bob Torricelli in a donor scandal and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a sex scandal. This confirms what we always knew. Bill Clinton does the work of three men.
Argus Hamilton
#7. I want to introduce my readers to people they may never have met, take them places they may never have visited, and present them with situations they may never have encountered.
J. Everett Prewitt
#8. What America did in Vietnam and the Congo - we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
Sukarno
#9. McCain fought in Vietnam - I think that he has enough civilian blood on his hands.
Vladimir Putin
#10. I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.
Richard M. Nixon
#11. Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.
Ron Paul
#12. Yeah, I love living in New York, man, and people who live in New York, we wear that fact like a badge right on our sleeve because we know that fact impresses everybody! I was in Vietnam. So what? I live in New York!
Denis Leary
#13. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.
Karl Marlantes
#14. I'm looking to be shot any time I step out of my car ... If I die, it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.
Medgar Evers
#15. The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.
Howard Fineman
#16. The malaise and military decline of the post-Vietnam years under President Jimmy Carter set the stage for Russian aggression abroad and uncertainty among our allies.
Paul Cook
#17. Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
#18. I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.
John F. Kerry
#19. Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.
Dan Jenkins
#20. People take sides on political things, such as the Vietnam War. War is immoral and war is wrong, but I don't think the clergy ought to bring it before the Church.
Warren Giles
#21. We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children.
John F. Kerry
#22. Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world.
Gerald R. Ford
#23. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#24. It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.
Jeannette Rankin
#26. World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.
Jim Webb
#27. What is in the Constitution is the burning desire and aspiration of all the people of Vietnam. So for the moment, we don't think about opposition parties.
Nong Duc Manh
#28. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
Conrad Black
#29. I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
Maya Lin
#30. East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.
William Kirby
#31. The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.
Bruce Springsteen
#32. The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies.
Robert Koger
#33. Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#34. During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam.
Gerald R. Ford
#35. As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.
Alan Moore
#36. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Tim O'Brien
#37. I had been in that part of the world as a soldier in Korea, so I had been interested in Vietnam.
Michael Caine
#38. Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.
Breyten Breytenbach
#39. What are we blaming? Is this Vietnam? We made a movie, it didn't make much money. I'm gonna be really happy if somebody watches it in 10 years' time and really enjoys it.
Kevin Costner
#40. I don't claim to know Israel. I don't speak Hebrew; my contacts are pretty limited. But I didn't know Vietnam; I didn't know Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras. It doesn't mean you can't reach your conclusions.
Norman Finkelstein
#41. Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.
John F. Kennedy
#42. Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.
John Charles Polanyi
#43. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.
Dick Pirozzolo
#44. Vietnam, really more accurately, Laos, was almost after Berlin the top problem at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration in '61, foreign problem.
McGeorge Bundy
#45. As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.
Kim Thuy
#46. The Marines in Korea never feared 'friendly fire' or artillery coming from the South Koreans - from their allies - like they did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted.
David Douglas Duncan
#47. I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.
Dylan McDermott
#48. I have to admit it that the large quantity of US money poured into Vietnam provoked ii ... a lot of bad habits.
Bui Diem
#49. My first professional acting job was in 'Hair' during the Vietnam War. So I think I've always been drawn to projects with a social conscience.
Clarke Peters
#50. Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.
Lauren Graham
#51. When I wrote War Against the Mafia as a Vietnam statement, I didn't expect much to come of it-but quite a bit came and it captured me. I continued the books to feed the obvious hunger that was there for heroic fiction.
Don Pendleton
#52. More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Aaron Huey
#53. Latin American countries are part of the West and that it is reasonable to expect a certain degree of openness in their societies that we do not demand of, say, China or Vietnam.
Mark Falcoff
#54. Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.
Bruce Jackson
#55. To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.
Marilyn Manson
#56. I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.
F. Murray Abraham
#57. It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.
Vanessa Kerry
#58. There are several places in Vietnam where they're teaching computer science from second grade in class, so they don't have a gender divide because everybody is expected to program.
Megan Smith
#59. When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.
Andrea Mitchell
#60. I did three tours in Vietnam. I guess a total of about almost two years.
Morley Safer
#61. I'm a very brave person. I can go to North Vietnam, I can challenge my government, but I can't challenge the man I'm with if means I'm going to end up alone.
Jane Fonda
#62. We [Vietnam] happen to offer good investment opportunities for foreigners, although this is not a one-way street. Both we and the foreign investors benefit greatly as a result.
Nguyen Minh Triet
#63. We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.
Tony Thomson
#64. Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.
Helen Thomas
#65. We wait here to meet the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam to discuss together a ceremony of orderly transfer of power so as to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed in the population.
Duong Van Minh
#66. Nobody heard of Vietnam until there was a war," Ali once proclaimed. "Nobody heard of Korea until there was a war. Nobody heard of Zaire until I fought there, and paying me is a whole lot cheaper than fighting a war."9
Thomas Hauser
#67. A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!
E.L. Doctorow
#68. I would like to ask a question. Would this sort of war or savage bombing which has taken place in Vietnam have been tolerated for so long, had the people been European?
Indira Gandhi
#69. It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#70. A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.
Henry Rollins
#71. The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them.
John F. Kerry
#72. Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.
Merle Haggard
#73. The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
J. William Fulbright
#74. To where? We don't know. To do what? We don't know either. No one tells us anything. We just follow orders.
Derrick Wolf
#75. Hell no / I ain't going to go / Clean out my cell / And take my tail / To jail / Without bail / Because it's better there eating / Watching television fed / Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead.
Muhammad Ali
#76. Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.
Robert Kiyosaki
#77. In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.
Tucker Elliot
#78. Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Robert Caro
#79. Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.
Bruce Jackson
#80. I'm from the Vietnam generation. I didn't serve.
Al Franken
#81. The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.
Robert Mundell
#82. I was appraising . . . not eye fooking.
Paul Allor
#83. During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.
Al Franken
#84. One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.
Kathleen Troia McFarland
#85. How do you know there's not a door to heaven in the sky between Malaysia and Vietnam?
Sarah Palin
#86. I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.
Jim Webb
#87. Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.
Kitty Kelley
#88. People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn't feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.
Sam Shepard
#89. The only thing worse than losing hope is to be the reason someone else loses hope.
Tucker Elliot
#90. The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam ...
J.G. Ballard
#91. It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange ... and it won't bother humans.
Karl Marlantes
#92. I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam.
Ed Bradley
#93. Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.
Don DeLillo
#94. Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it.
Bruce H. Norton
#95. I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
Burt Rutan
#96. I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.
Ed Bradley
#97. Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.
Nong Duc Manh
#98. Hillary Clinton will travel to Vietnam with the president this Friday. It's a fact that at the height of the war in 1971, she tried to enlist in the Marines, but they turned her down. Apparently we weren't that mad at the Viet Cong.
Argus Hamilton
#99. The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, 'You're flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent.
Tucker Elliot
#100. George W. had a plan. He arranged to join the Air National Guard in Texas, which meant he would not be sent to Vietnam.
Peter Jennings
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
