Quotes About Vietnam

#1. I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.

Kurt Vonnegut

#2. The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,

Robert D. Kaplan

#3. Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.

Jerry Stiller

#4. I think that Vietnam, many of us who served in Vietnam thought that was very wasteful, and to what end? To what end? What were we really there for? What were we really fighting for?

Richard Armitage

#5. Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of tragedy. And her arms reached out wide.

Holly Goldberg Sloan

#6. Harvard is Classical Military Theory, Improv is Vietnam

Tina Fey

#7. There's a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam, said Switters.

Tom Robbins

#8. This edition of The Making of a Quagmire differs in a number of ways from the original one. Approximately one-third of the text has been cut in an effort to eliminate material that seemed clearly redundant or that did not relate directly to the Vietnam war.

David Halberstam

#9. There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

Dennis Prager

#10. 'These boat people,' says the government of Hong Kong, 'they all want to go to America.' Well, I swear I don't know why, do you? I mean, take Vietnam. Why would any Vietnamese come to America after what American did to Vietnam? Don't they remember My Lai, napalm, Sylvester Stallone?

Linda Ellerbee

#11. I have finally learned that I am as much a part of this country as those villagers. Whether they like it or not, my umbilical cord is buried in the earth of Vietnam just like theirs.

Sherry Garland

#12. God willing, the occupation forces will be driven out as happened in Vietnam.

Muqtada Al Sadr

#13. In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?

Yoko Ono

#14. In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Noam Chomsky

#15. When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.

Grace Paley

#16. Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says "Bad war, good soldier." Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.

Max Cleland

#17. I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them - active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular - to try and end the war.

Jane Fonda

#18. Neither Johnson nor his party nor the government as a whole were willing to raise, train, equip, and then send Vietnam sufficient manpower to do the job.

Stephen Ambrose

#19. Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

Gore Vidal

#20. I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

Radhanath Swami

#21. I wasn't for Vietnam. When I told that to the hippie newspaper, all my people got nervous.

Loretta Lynn

#22. Sometimes a party must sail against the wind. We cannot heed the call of those who say it is time to furl the sail. The party that tore itself apart over Vietnam in the 1960s cannot afford to tear itself apart today over budget cuts in basic social programs.

Edward Kennedy

#23. Don't get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn't the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam.

Tom Johnson

#24. I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.

Sebastian Junger

#25. The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.

Bruce Jackson

#26. It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, Give in, or I'll beat you some more.

Niall Ferguson

#27. Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#28. For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.

James Fallows

#29. Rome, on the other hand, lost - suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.

Robert L. O'Connell

#30. Nature did not gift us with a mighty Mekong like Thailand and Vietnam, with their vast and naturally fertile plains. Nature instead put our islands ahead of our neighbours in the path of typhoons from the Pacific.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#31. The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

Oliver Stone

#32. Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.

Harry Shearer

#33. The conclusion that many uniformed military came away from Vietnam with was that political interference, dominance of strategy and even tactics were a very bad way to conduct a war, and that indeed, if that was going to be our practice, that we shouldn't wage conflict again.

Robert McFarlane

#34. The Vietnam War was causing people to get drafted; I had received a deferment to finish my undergraduate education, and in order to continue to get a deferment, you had to go to graduate school.

Robert Shapiro

#35. I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.

William Westmoreland

#36. The U.S. dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the Allies used on Germany and Japan together in the Second World War.

Nick Davies

#37. It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

Junot Diaz

#38. war historian Paul Fussell suggests that in World War II heavy drinking was the answer to fear, boredom and the terrible damage to the sense of identity experienced by so many combatants. Drunkenness, he writes, did for the men of this war what drugs did for the next generation in Vietnam.

Liz Byrski

#39. The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.

Bill Ayers

#40. [Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives.

Oscar Levant

#41. Vietnam is a jungle. You had jungle warfare. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, you have sand. [There is no need to worry about a protracted war because] from a historical basis, Middle East conflicts do not last a long time.

Dan Quayle

#42. Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.

John Pilger

#43. I wouldn't characterize anybody who fought in Vietnam as a war hero. In 23 bombing sorties, there must have been civilians that were killed and there's no heroism to that.

Medea Benjamin

#44. The Philippines was with the U.S. in the Second World War, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and now in the war against terrorism.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#45. In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

Charlie Savage

#46. I deeply regret having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam. For this and any other distortions about my personal life, I want to apologize to my family, friends, colleagues and students. Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment.

Joseph J. Ellis

#47. O'Neill was perceptive enough to understand the country had a new leader that it wanted to believe in. After the tragedy of Dallas, after the quicksand of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the "malaise" of Jimmy Carter, it needed one.

Chris Matthews

#48. Well, look at what people are doing for returned veterans now. The wounded warriors. They're working hard to make the wounded veterans feel that they are loved and welcomed home, unlike Vietnam. It was not a very kind, gentle world then. I think we are kinder and gentler.

Barbara Bush

#49. The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

Jay Parini

#50. K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam ... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.

Bob Woodward

#51. Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline.

Horst Faas

#52. I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

Don DeLillo

#53. I can remember as a young lieutenant being sent into the DMZ in the divided Vietnam, from North Vietnam.

Oliver North

#54. The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

Henry A. Kissinger

#55. The POW camps of North Vietnam were packed with Air Force and Naval Academy graduates. The six midshipmen in my Naval Academy class of 1968 who served as liaisons between the Marine Corps and the Brigade of Midshipmen later suffered nine Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and one man killed in action.

Jim Webb

#56. We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost ... the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world.

Richard M. Nixon

#57. The object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship, ... Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don't want to do that and that's their decision.

Ho Chi Minh

#58. When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

Maya Lin

#59. After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party.

Heather Wilson

#60. We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

Steven Weber

#61. We Americans are too often like children, steeped in moral tales that lack complexity and nuanced meaning.

(from the foreword in The War I survived Was Vietnam by Michael Uhl)

Steve Rees

#62. I am not haunted by memories of Vietnam. But I must admit I never thought we would again witness in my lifetime the specter of politicians picking targets and ruling out offensive measures in the absurd hope that the enemy would respond to our restraint by yielding to our demands.

John McCain

#63. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#64. When I took command in Vietnam, I gave great emphasis to food and medical care - and to the mail.

William Westmoreland

#65. So now it turns out that Thomas Jefferson was having sex with Sally Hemings while serving in the 101st Airborne during the Vietnam War.

Ann Coulter

#66. What we do with this peace-whether we preserve it and defend it, or whether we lose it and let it slip away-will be the measure of our worthiness of the spirit and sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands who gave their lives in two World Wars, Korea, and in Vietnam.

Richard M. Nixon

#67. When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.

Don Winslow

#68. Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.

Noam Chomsky

#69. I'm not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I'm going to say I'm opposed to war. But I'm also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.

John Wooden

#70. There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.

Quentin Tarantino

#71. You really had to learn to protect yourself from all Gooks in Vietnam, or else you would end up dead.

Peter P. Mahoney

#72. Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

Miguel Syjuco

#73. I remember being a kid and the Vietnam War was huge and looking at Watergate.

David Cross

#74. As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.

William Westmoreland

#75. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

Tony Hillerman

#76. In 1975, the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with U.S. helicopters seeking to rescue leading U.S. personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.

Martin Jacques

#77. The events that followed our withdrawal from Vietnam, including the plight of the boat people and the more than 1 million slaughtered by the new communist rulers of Cambodia, showed that media critics who said we were on the wrong side were mistaken.

Richard M. Nixon

#78. Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam war saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam war will be necessary here. I think the American people will get us out of this war.

Daniel Ellsberg

#79. Widowhood conferred a mystery and status divorce lacked. The difference between returning World War II and Vietnam veterans. Both had been through a war, but a judgmental public conferred glory only on those who had been victimized in a socially acceptable manner.

Nevada Barr

#80. Although one of the key justifications for the Vietnam war was to prevent the spread of communism, the U.S. defeat was to produce nothing of the kind: apart from the fact that Cambodia and Laos became embroiled, the effects were essentially confined to Vietnam.

Martin Jacques

#81. I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money. (On Vietnam War)

Charles De Gaulle

#82. I guess I just don't see America as separate from Vietnam or Ethiopia. This mentality of 'our team's better than yours' - it's a high school idea. My kids don't see those dividing lines, and I don't want to either.

Brad Pitt

#83. After listening intently for a few seconds, he turned to me. "North Vietnam?" He shook his head derisively. "Very, very bad." He listened some more, then denounced Brezhnev.

Rob Reid

#84. Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg

#85. American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

Jay Parini

#86. In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

Tom Brokaw

#87. In what is perhaps the strangest turn in the President's efforts to rally support, he agreed that Iraq is just like Vietnam, but in a good way.

Jon Stewart

#88. I was very much a child of the 1960s. I protested the Vietnam War and grew up in a fairly politicized home. My father was like a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. I grew up among left-wing lawyers.

Marianne Williamson

#89. There are some similarities, of course (between Iraq and Vietnam). Death is terrible.

George W. Bush

#90. The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

Gloria Estefan

#91. The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

Edward Abbey

#92. Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

Margaret Atwood

#93. I'm old and crazy, but I still give a damn. And I still think the boys got screwed over in Vietnam.

Waylon Jennings

#94. While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.

Brendan Sexton III

#95. These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.

Neil Sheehan

#96. I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

Aaron Sorkin

#97. (Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.

Molly Haskell

#98. And concerning anything in this society involved in helping Negroes, the federal government shows an inability to function. But it can function in South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Berlin, and in other places where it has no business. But it can't function in Mississippi.

Malcolm X

#99. Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

Robert Dallek

#100. I saw a large, red dried swath that I immediately identified clearly as blood. I covered the war in Vietnam. I saw a lot of it [blood] there.

Sam Donaldson