Quotes About Vietnam War

#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 think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.

Michael McCormick

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

Richard M. Nixon

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

Tim O'Brien

#9. 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

#10. Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.

Dan Jenkins

#11. 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

#12. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.

Rick DeStefanis

#13. 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

#14. World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.

Jim Webb

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#19. 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

#20. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.

Tim O'Brien

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.

Bruce Jackson

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.

Merle Haggard

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. I was appraising . . . not eye fooking.

Paul Allor

#38. 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

#39. It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange ... and it won't bother humans.

Karl Marlantes

#40. Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

Don DeLillo

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Path To War was the last thing that John Frankenheimer directed, I think, before he died. I'm a huge U.S. history buff, and I studied the Vietnam era in college, so when I read the script, I was, like, "I really want to be in this thing so badly ... "

Peter Jacobson

#45. You have left too much of yourself in this land for it not to be yours. I, too, will always be yours, for you have left too much of yourself with me for it to be otherwise.

Nicholas Proffitt

#46. ... it would matter ... to the tens of thousands of young Americans ... who would ... be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.

Stephen King

#47. From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.

Nguyen Cao Ky

#48. Iraq was a war of choice, like Vietnam.

Chuck Hagel

#49. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

John F. Kerry

#50. People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again ... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood.

Sylvester Stallone

#51. After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

Leon Panetta

#52. My opposition to the Vietnam War. I was the first Hollywood actor to speak out against it.

Robert Vaughn

#53. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

Karl Marlantes

#54. So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Diane Wakoski

#55. I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.

Benjamin Spock

#56. My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.

Joel Kinnaman

#57. A photograph can make you feel so many different things. When you look at war photographs of Vietnam, or something similar, it makes you feel anguish and sadness and pain. Then in other moments, when you look at Jackie Kennedy walking down Fifth Avenue, that makes you feel glory and richness.

Mario Testino

#58. Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

Adrienne Rich

#59. We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

George Wald

#60. Have you folks been following the controversy with John Kerry and his service in Vietnam and the Swift Boat campaign? It all took place in Vietnam and now it just won't go away. I was thinking about this - if John Kerry had just ducked the war like everybody else he wouldn't have this trouble.

David Letterman

#61. The passions and pain of the Vietnam War have subsided to a degree to which we are now able to look at the broader achievements of the Johnson administration," said playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Broadway show about the president, "All the Way," is playing to packed houses.

The Washington Post

#62. I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

Larry Hagman

#63. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.

Anonymous

#64. The boys that were running away from America because they didn't want to get involved with the Vietnam War had come to me. They would tell me how they felt.

Eartha Kitt

#65. No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war).

Margo Kingston

#66. The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

Kurt Vonnegut

#67. The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.

Denis Johnson

#68. One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#69. You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.

Richard M. Nixon

#70. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

Richard Norton Smith

#71. I know this: that in your own hearts and your own souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam War as I am for killing these people.

Charles Manson

#72. I said to the president's wife, Vietnam is the main reason we are having trouble with the youth of America. It is a war without explanation or reason.

Eartha Kitt

#73. Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

Bill Ayers

#74. I had never fought in the Vietnam War and had dinner in Paris on the same day. I had no context to understand the casualties or the romance a parent feels on the same day.

Jim Gaffigan

#75. 'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.

James Dobson

#76. The Quiet American is anti the people who took them into the Vietnam War.

Michael Caine

#77. I'm a lad of the '60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

Richard Branson

#78. Before we put an American in harm's way, tell us why. No one wants to see the region descend into further chaos. There's a lot of concern about getting embroiled in another Vietnam and ... about sending American troops once again to fight someone else's war.

Xavier Becerra

#79. My view of Bradley Manning is that he's a very courageous young man who ... did what I didn't have the guts to do during the Vietnam war.

Ray McGovern

#80. A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

Glenn Greenwald

#81. Stories can save us.

Tim O'Brien

#82. By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war.

Vladislav Tamarov

#83. The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg [war crime trials], we're doomed to have it repeated.

Haskell Wexler

#84. We still seek no wider war.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#85. The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition.

Sylvester Stallone

#86. It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Edward S. Greenberg

#87. We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

Denis Johnson

#88. The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

Adrienne Rich

#89. I'm not so sure that people consider homelessness to be as important as, say, the Vietnam War. One should never even try to equate them because, of course, they're tragedies on both sides of the coin.

Graham Nash

#90. Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

Kurt Vonnegut

#91. Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

Graydon Carter

#92. I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.

Harrison Ford

#93. World War II was just as dirty and brutal as Vietnam, just as confusing.

David Ayer

#94. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

Tim O'Brien

#95. I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

Neil Sheehan

#96. 'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

Karl Marlantes

#97. It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

Salman Rushdie

#98. When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

Samantha Power

#99. Having gone through the civil rights struggle, having gone through the anti-Vietnam War struggle, by the time I was in my 20s, I had something that the current generation doesnt have. And that is a sense of efficacy.

Paul Solman

#100. The Vietnam war will not be over until it ends for everyone. Over four hundred thousand U.S. veterans are still recovering from wounds inflicted on their bodies and their spirit. Sixty-three million souls in Vietnam are still suffering from their 'victory.

Le Ly Hayslip