Vietnam famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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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 -
Was the Vietnam conflict a war which should have, as a matter of constitutional law, required a declaration of war by Congress?
-- Arlen Specter -
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 -
I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.
-- Benjamin Spock -
To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.
-- Benjamin Spock -
Had there been a reporter along with Lieutenant Calley when he massacred those people in Vietnam, I think that probably wouldn't have happened.
-- Bob Schieffer -
I wanted to have the opportunity to travel to Vietnam and Sydney, and have the chance to work there.
-- Brendan Fraser -
Enough is enough. This is how we get started in Vietnam.
-- Charles Rangel -
With all the arguments and discussions about the Vietnam War, what did the visual image do? It ended the war.
-- Cornell Capa -
[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up,
-- David Frum -
Vietnam was worse than immoral - it was a mistake.
-- Dean Acheson -
In 2003, Congress authorized the construction of a visitor center for the Vietnam Memorial to help provide information and educate the public about the memorial and the Vietnam War.
-- Dennis Cardoza -
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 -
I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.
-- Ed Bradley -
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 -
One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.
-- George H. W. Bush -
One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.
-- George McGovern -
I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.
-- George McGovern -
Let us put an end to self-inflicted wounds. Let us remember that our national unity is a most priceless asset. Let us deny our adversaries the satisfaction of using Vietnam to pit Americans against Americans.
-- Gerald R. Ford -
I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.
-- Gerald Scarfe -
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 -
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 -
Because the GIs were sent massively to South Vietnam, maybe it's a good idea to have a broadcast for them.
-- Hanoi Hannah -
After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party.
-- Heather Wilson -
I'm very moved to be here today, ... Our lives are now much better, but Vietnam remains a very poor country. We need to work much harder.
-- Ho Chi Minh -
When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.
-- Howard Zinn -
In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do
-- Hugo Black -
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.
-- J. William Fulbright -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.
-- Jean-Marie Le Pen -
Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.
-- Jerry Stiller -
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 -
Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.
-- John Pilger -
I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement.
-- Jon Voight -
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 -
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 -
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 -
It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
-- Kim Stanley -
Our young men in Vietnam have not only acquitted themselves in an outstanding manner during combat operations, but they also have been outstanding ambassadors of goodwill in the vital civic action and pacification work among the tortured populace of South Vietnam.
-- Lewis William Walt -
I wasn't for Vietnam. When I told that to the hippie newspaper, all my people got nervous.
-- Loretta Lynn -
I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.
-- Madeleine Albright -
Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.
-- Madeleine M. Kunin -
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 -
As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.
-- Mark Shields -
John Kerry's service did not end in Vietnam. It began there.
-- Max Cleland -
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 -
But although Australia was also involved in the Vietnam conflict, I can remember my dad telling us that if we were in Australia, we wouldn't be drafted until we were 20.
-- Mel Gibson -
I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.
-- Michael Dirda -
Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
-- Michael Herr -
The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they're dying in vain right this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain. That's what's worse.
-- Mike Gravel -
I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.
-- Mike Mansfield -
After four or five different wars, I grew weary of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it's not that difficult, really.
-- Morley Safer -
God willing, the occupation forces will be driven out as happened in Vietnam.
-- Muqtada al Sadr -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.
-- Oliver Stone -
I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam
-- Parker Stevenson -
It seems to me the American people never really forgave the Democrats for being right about Vietnam.
-- Paul Begala -
John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in North Vietnam in the prison camps took torture to avoid saying.
-- Paul Galanti -
Senator Albert Gore Sr. was one of the first outspoken critics of the Vietnam War.
-- Peter Jennings -
Back in the old Corp, we weren't training those privates to infiltrate into the peacetime Marine Corp. We were training those privates to go to Vietnam.
-- R. Lee Ermey -
Everybody respects the Vietnam Veterans of America.
-- R. Lee Ermey -
Communications are better now than in my Vietnam days.
-- R. Lee Ermey -
I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam War and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.
-- Richard Hell -
The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.
-- Richard Holbrooke -
Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
-- Robert Caro -
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
-- Robert Jay Lifton -
I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
-- Robert McNamara -
The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
-- Robert McNamara -
My opposition to the Vietnam War. I was the first Hollywood actor to speak out against it.
-- Robert Vaughn -
It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
-- Salman Rushdie -
Any of these Vietnam vets that have been there and know the deal, they don't feel that any Hollywood endeavor about the Vietnam era has ever gotten it right yet.
-- Sam Elliott -
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 -
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. -
The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.
-- Sara Paretsky -
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 -
I was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam.
-- Stephen Ambrose -
The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.
-- Stephen Ambrose -
Obama avoided the Vietnam draft with a letter from his family doctor diagnosing him as medically eight.
-- Stephen Colbert -
I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.
-- Terry Gilliam -
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
-- Thom Gunn -
If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.
-- Tom Seaver -
Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
-- Tom Wolfe -
Although I wasnt 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 -
You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo.
-- Tony Snow -
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
-- Tracy Kidder -
I am afraid if the present trend in Vietnam continues that direct confrontation, first of all between Washington and Peking, is inevitable.
-- U Thant -
I want to make sure that the Coast Guard people in Vietnam know that I am hearing about them often and that I am pleased with what I hear.
-- Wallace M. Greene -
It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,
-- Walter Cronkite -
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 Eldridge Odom -
Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there.
-- William Westmoreland -
When I took command in Vietnam, I gave great emphasis to food and medical care - and to the mail
-- William Westmoreland -
By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?
-- William Westmoreland -
As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.
-- William Westmoreland -
If John McCain were really a war hero he would've won Vietnam.
-- Zach Braff
