Top 100 Vietnam's Quotes
#1. Westmoreland recognized that the only way to seal South Vietnam's eight hundred-mile western border was to shut down the infiltration routes.
Robert D. Sander
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.
Marilyn Manson
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. How do you know there's not a door to heaven in the sky between Malaysia and Vietnam?
Sarah Palin
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange ... and it won't bother humans.
Karl Marlantes
#15. 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
#16. And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.
Karl Marlantes
#17. 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
#18. Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Dave Eggers
#19. 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
#20. There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.
Noam Chomsky
#21. Even as U.S. policy in recent decades has become progressively militarized, so too has the Vietnam-induced gap separating the U.S. military from American society persisted and perhaps even widened.47
Andrew J. Bacevich
#22. One minute you're gettin a nice blow job, the next it's like fuckin Vietnam, assault teams everyplace you look, scuba units climbin out of the Jacuzzi, chicks runnin around screaming. . . .
Thomas Pynchon
#23. Because the GIs were sent massively to South Vietnam, maybe it's a good idea to have a broadcast for them.
Hanoi Hannah
#24. At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.
Neil Sheehan
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. McNamara's plea was that he had no idea that Vietnam had a history of longing for self-determination, a history of resisting foreign invasion.
Morley Safer
#29. I joined the People's Armed Forces in 1961 to 1984, and I was also a soldier in the southern battle of Vietnam during the resistance against the Americans. I went to the battlefield in order to regain national independence.
Nguyen Tan Dung
#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. 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
#32. It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
Salman Rushdie
#33. He's a novice, but he's had these - he's experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started - he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam.
James Stockdale
#34. 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
#35. 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.
#36. I fought as an infantry Marine on one of the Vietnam War's harshest battlefields. After leaving the Marine Corps, I studied law and found a fulfilling career as an author and journalist. But again and again, I came back to the personal fulfillment that can only come from public service.
Jim Webb
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Vietnam, we take over by doing pedicure! That's how we take over. We take over one foot at a time, damn it - that's the plan of attack right there. We take over from the toe up, that's the plan. We spread over USA like fungus from the toe.
Dat Phan
#40. May not lead to reduction in U.S. casualties until its final stages, as our casualty rate may be unrelated to the total number of American troops in South Vietnam. To kill about 150 U.S. soldiers a week, the enemy needs to attack only a small portion of our forces ... .
Henry Kissinger
#41. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#42. If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.
William Odom
#44. A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it.
Janice Y.K. Lee
#45. My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
Walter Dean Myers
#47. It's a weird scene. You win a few baseball games and all of a sudden you're surrounded by reporters and TV men with cameras asking you about Vietnam and race relations.
Vida Blue
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.
Richard Flanagan
#52. We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.
Barack Obama
#53. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.
James Hillman
#54. 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
#55. 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.
#56. I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America's involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar. Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that oft-misunderstood war should be grateful for his effort.
Jim Webb
#57. One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.
George McGovern
#58. The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.
Craig Venter
#59. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#60. A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.
Tariq Ali
#61. It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.
Tom Clancy
#62. I think matching up Vietnam vets with these Iraqi vets would be a really great thing. When soldiers say only other soldiers can understand, that's what they're talking about: what it means to kill.
Nina Berman
#63. President Bush's campaign is now attacking John Kerry for throwing away some of his medals to protest the Vietnam War. Bush did not have any medals to throw away, but in his defense he did have all his services records thrown out.
Jay Leno
#64. I think the new generations in America, the America's youth, no longer care about Vietnam. They don't want to hear any more about it.
Alexander Haig
#65. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts.
Seymour Hersh
#66. Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals.
Tom Glenn
#67. He had not understood that we were combat photographers, and our jobs were as relevant and justifiable - or as irrelevant and unjustifiable - as anyone's in Vietnam.
Nick Mills
#68. [Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
Ernest Hemingway,
#69. Non ... Gratum ... Anum ... Ro - ' I can't make that out." "Rodentum," Bosch said. Sakai looked at him. "Dog Latin," Bosch told him. "Not worth a rat's ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.
Michael Connelly
#70. Kerry is saying that Bush never showed up for his national guard duty ... and now Bush is on the attack. He's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the national guard by hiding out in the jungles of Vietnam.
Jay Leno
#71. If you look at China - and frankly, Vietnam now is doing a big number, and you look at Japan and India and Mexico - Mexico's killing us at the border and they're killing us with trade.
Donald Trump
#72. By 1973, John Kerry had already accused American soldiers of committing war crimes in Vietnam, thrown someone else's medals to the ground in an anti-war demonstration, and married his first heiress.
Ann Coulter
#73. There's an article about Chicago closing dozens of schools and I should probably read it because it seems important and relevant - but to be honest, the headline about the professor in Florida telling students to 'stomp on Jesus' has really got my attention.
Tucker Elliot
#74. The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture-aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere.
Stephen Vizinczey
#75. Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.'s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.
Robert Dallek
#76. Vietnam helped me realize who the true heroes really are in this world. It's not the home-run hitters.
Willie Stargell
#77. 'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#78. I guess it was hard for him to look at the logic behind the draft lotteries, because that same logic had taken away his father. And, anyway, what's so logical about the day you were born deciding when you might die? That's just a cruel joke, as I see it.
A.S. King
#79. 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
#80. So much of my work involved the Vietnam War that it would have been obscene to show it in a gallery. But now, it's different; it's important to remember and to enable the young to discover what to some of us is still so present.
Martha Rosler
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
Tim O'Brien
#84. 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
#85. Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.
Bob Gunton
#86. The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.
Nigel Hamilton
#87. By the year 2025, 500 million people will die of smoking. Now, that's a Vietnam War every day for 27 years. That's the Titanic sinking every 27 minutes for 27 years.
C. Everett Koop
#88. The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.
George McGovern
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I write about what life was like for typical young women of the sixties - not the type that made headlines, the Hanoi Janes or Angela Davises, but moderates who nonetheless got swept up by history's tides during that turbulent time. All that turmoil lends itself to drama, intrigue, and murder.
Kay Kendall
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