Vietnam War Quotes

• 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

  Military, War, Struggle

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• Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Inspirational, Motivational, Military

  Quoted in Montreal Gazette, 16 May 1975

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• No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Military, War, Misunderstood

  "No More Vietnams". Book by Richard M. Nixon, 1985.

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• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Peace, Military, War

  Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 1953

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• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Wisdom, Peace, Kings

  "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 16 Apr. 1963

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• Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

  Michael Herr

  War, Childhood, Vietnam

  Dispatches ch. 3 (1977)

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• All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

  Michael Herr

  Military, Thinking, People

  1989 In the Observer, 15 Jan.

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• 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

  Mistake, Men, Vietnam

  Testimony before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 22 Apr. 1971

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

  John F. Kennedy

  Vietnam, Problem, Credible

  1961 Attributed remark to journalist James Reston, following Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev, Jun.

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• Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Military, War, Taught Us

  "Quote for the Day II". The year 1979 quote, www.theatlantic.com. January 09, 2007.

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• 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

  War, Believe, Men

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• Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

  Omar N. Bradley

  War, Evil, Nuclear Missiles

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• The signs of the Vietnam War protestors said "Make Love not War!" It didn't seem to me that they were capable of either.

  Ronald Reagan

  War, Making Love, Vietnam

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• Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

  Dalton Trumbo

  Morning, War, Coffee

  Dalton Trumbo (2007). “Johnny Got His Gun”, p.23, Kensington Publishing Corp.

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• Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Inspirational, Military, War

  Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on War”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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

  Richard M. Nixon

  War, President, Vietnam

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• Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies.

  John F. Kennedy

  War, Commitment, Risk

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• There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

  Edward Abbey

  Veterans Day, Peace, War

  Edward Abbey (1998). “The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel”, p.140, Macmillan

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• You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, Military, Vietnam

  News conference, 7 Apr. 1954

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• I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

  Mike Mansfield

  War, Vietnam, Able

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• I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

  Maya Lin

  War, Artist, Memorial

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• You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

  Jeannette Rankin

  Peace, Military, War

  Quoted in Hannah Josephson, Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress (1974)

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• This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.

  Frank Church

  Country, War, Generations

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• We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Home, Boys, Asian

  Speech at Akron University, Akron, Ohio, 21 Oct. 1964

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• A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Change, Uplifting, Spiritual

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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