The Korean War Quotes

#1. I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go ... It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'

Clint Eastwood

#2. Since the Korean War, U.S. and South Korea have established an enduring friendship with shared interests, such as denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, combating aggression abroad and developing our economies.

Charles B. Rangel

#3. I got called back into the Navy during the Korean War.

Daniel J. Evans

#4. I proudly served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artillery operations specialist in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the Second Infantry Division.

Charles B. Rangel

#5. I was with a special services unit in the Korean war, and when I got out, the biggest thing I got was a GI scholarship.

Chuck Feeney

#6. From now on, we're home schooling you. Whatever we don't know, you don't know. When did the Korean War start? I don't know, and neither do you!

George Lopez

#7. 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

#8. As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

Thomas Frank

#9. I have one criticism about the Negro troops who fought under my command in the Korean War. They didn't send me enough of them.

Douglas MacArthur

#10. Ran "Inchon" - it is a brutal but gripping picture about the Korean War and for once we're the good guys & the Communists are the villains. The producer was Japanese or Korean which probably explains the preceding sentence.

Ronald Reagan

#11. I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

Clint Eastwood

#12. I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

Chang-rae Lee

#13. As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.

Ban Ki-moon

#14. The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.

Paul Robeson

#15. I took Beetle home thinking that after the Korean War was over, I would have to take him out of the Army. I thought, well, what am I going to do with him?

Mort Walker

#16. South Korea first allowed women into the military in 1950 during the Korean War. Back then, female soldiers mainly held administrative and support positions. Women began to take on combat roles in the 1990s when the three military academies, exclusive to men, began accepting women.

Kim Young-ha

#17. The U.S. military was segregated 'til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.

Clint Eastwood

#18. The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men who were being called to serve were World War II veterans participating in Ready Reserve units.

J. Anthony Lukas

#19. To honor the legacy of veterans and the democratic principles they fought for, I am glad that I introduced the Korean War Veterans Recognition Act which was enacted in 2009.

Charles B. Rangel

#20. Hardly had I left when we ran into the Korean war, doubled what I had asked for and doubled it again. I had told him I would stay in Government, be honored to, but not with the Air Force.

Stuart Symington

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I was drafted during the Korean War.

Clint Eastwood

#26. It is not widely known that, ever since the end of the Korean War, the United States has spent essentially the same amount of money on defense, in real terms, every single year.

James Fallows

#27. The Korean War has also show quite clearly that in a major conflict manpower is as important as horsepower.

Aly Khan

#28. The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

Pankaj Mishra

#29. In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

Noah Feldman

#30. 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

#31. After serving in the Korean War, I actually started working towards a master's degree in finance.

John Cullum

#32. I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Chang-rae Lee

#33. When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.

Ban Ki-moon

#34. I'm sure the most favorite airplane in my career would still be the Sabre F86 cleft wing , which allowed me to be credited with 2 Russian-built Mig-15 destroyed during the Korean War. Where I was in 1953.

Buzz Aldrin

#35. When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

Robert Jay Lifton

#36. When the Korean economy was just trying to get back on its feet after the war, having parks was a luxury.

Lee Myung-bak

#37. I went home one night and told my dad that an older kid was picking on me. My Dad, a Korean War vet and a Chicago cop for 30 years, told me, 'You better pick up a brick and hit him in the head.' That's when I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to have to start dealing with things in a different way.'

Steve Wilkos

#38. All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.

Oliver North

#39. I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.

Chang-rae Lee

#40. As it turns out, the atrocities we suffered were committed by none other than ourselves, and the inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident helped form the roots of the frantic hatred that thrives to this day. (2007: 9)

Hwang Sok-yong

#41. He wanted to know what assurance we could give the American people that we aren't getting the tar licked out of us by the North Korean army. It has never happened to us. It won't happen this time.

Harry S. Truman

#42. We had it drilled into us time and time again: 'If someone above you falls, grip tightly to the vertical rope and cradle that person in your arms until help can get to you.' ... If someone fell down on me I swear I would have bitten him on the ass and would keep on biting until he got off onhis own.

C.S. Crawford

#43. As a Korean War veteran, I know firsthand and understand the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform.

Charles B. Rangel

#44. We've made some mistakes in this country in times past - the Korean conflict proceeding that, some say proceeding the Persian Gulf War, where we were ambiguous as to what we would do.

Fred Thompson

#45. When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of the earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets.

Pat Frank

#46. My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn't seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.

Jim Yong Kim

#47. It was during this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid.

Pat Frank

#48. As a Korean War Veteran, I know too well the troubling nature of war. This is why I will always support a diplomatic answer before military intervention.

Charles B. Rangel

#49. The two-war strategy was a product of the cold war, when we had to have the ability to fight the Russians on the plains of Europe and fight the Chinese on the Korean peninsula at the same time. That costs an awful lot of money.

Joe Klein

#50. The people your brother killed - well, they all had souls. They weren't Satan. Ryu Yohan wasn't Satan, either. His faith was twisted, that's all. I know now. I know that God is innocent. (2007: 143)

Hwang Sok-yong

#51. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

David Halberstam