Quotes About War In Vietnam

#1. 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.

#2. I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

Sammy Davis Jr.

#3. We were against the war in Vietnam and for voter registration and social issues. Everybody has their choices, and the obligation of a comedian is first to entertain. And if you're so inclined, and you have some bigger thought, make sure you express it, because that's a gift.

Tom Smothers

#4. The majority of the American population had questioned the justification for the war in Vietnam. They did not appreciate the government's rationale for sending American boys to die halfway around the world; communists in Vietnam had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Calvin Murphy

#5. Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened.

Rachel Klein

#6. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat atheistic communism.

Ernest Becker

#7. I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.

J. William Fulbright

#8. Since There are so many questions about what the president was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam?

Jeff Gannon

#9. For the past several years, I've been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life's exit ramp.

Joe Klein

#10. In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.

Noam Chomsky

#11. They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#12. I never would've imagined in the first part of my life that I could've stood up and said anything. The war in Vietnam changed me. I was so angry. Some of my speeches probably weren't well considered.

Jane Fonda

#13. The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.

Robert McNamara

#14. In point of fact all Americans are automatically turned down by China these days because of the escalation of Johnson's war in Vietnam, which several times has intruded into China.

Anna Louise Strong

#15. Did you know that the percentage of young people in the crucial 'youthquake' age bracket of 15 to 24 was higher in 1973 than in 1967 ? Therefore it was glam rock that ended the war in Vietnam.

Ozzy Osbourne

#16. I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case.

Floyd Abrams

#17. I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.

Martin Luther

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. (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

#21. There is one hell of a difference between fighting in the ring and going to war in Vietnam.

Muhammad Ali

#22. I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

Oliver Stone

#23. In the late 60's I was enrolled at Occidental College majoring in philosophy and taking several studio art classes, but I dropped out. It was a very confusing time with the war in Vietnam and the social changes sweeping the nation.

Stephen Beal

#24. I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.

Evan Osnos

#25. Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.

Robert Dallek

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Bruce Jackson

#31. 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

#32. The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

Stephen Ambrose

#33. This war in Vietnam is, I believe, a war for civilization. Certainly it is not a war of our seeking. It is a war thrust upon us and we cannot yield to tyranny.

Francis Spellman

#34. The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.

H.R. McMaster

#35. I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

Benjamin Spock

#36. I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

Bill Ayers

#37. The war in vietnam threatened to tear our society apart, and the political and philosophical disagreements that separated each side continue, to some extent. It's been said that these memorials reflect a hunger for healing.

Ronald Reagan

#38. Moms and daughters can negotiate over anything, and they can go on longer than it took to settle the Vietnam War.

Steve Schirripa

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Michael McCormick

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. McCain fought in Vietnam - I think that he has enough civilian blood on his hands.

Vladimir Putin

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

Richard M. Nixon

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

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

Tim O'Brien

#55. 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

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

Dan Jenkins

#57. 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

#58. We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children.

John F. Kerry

#59. 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

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

Rick DeStefanis

#61. 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

#62. I was too important to go to Vietnam.

Mitt Romney

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

Jim Webb

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Tim O'Brien

#74. I had been in that part of the world as a soldier in Korea, so I had been interested in Vietnam.

Michael Caine

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

John F. Kennedy

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. I have to admit it that the large quantity of US money poured into Vietnam provoked ii ... a lot of bad habits.

Bui Diem

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Bruce Jackson

#92. To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.

Marilyn Manson

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. I did three tours in Vietnam. I guess a total of about almost two years.

Morley Safer

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.

Tony Thomson