Vietnam Quotes - Page 16

• 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

  Summer, Impossible, Ends

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• When I took command in Vietnam, I gave great emphasis to food and medical care - and to the mail

  William Westmoreland

  Care, Mail, Medical

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• Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Tired, Exercise, Yale

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• Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything.

  Ronald Reagan

  Funny, War, Rights

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• 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

  House, Might, Able

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• 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

  Cutting, Memorial, Earth

  Quoted in Smithsonian Magazine, Aug. 1996

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• 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

  Children, War, Iraq

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• During Richard Nixon’s first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South’s ability to defend itself. The result was a success - until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.

  Melvin Laird

  Jobs, Cutting, Building Up

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• 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

  Country, Needs, Today

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• 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

  Relationship, Moving Forward, Our Veterans

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968...Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops...Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces.

  Chalmers Johnson

  War, Loss, Fighting

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• We jumped into the protest of Vietnam before the Black Panther Party ever started, before the Black Panther Party was even thought of. In fact, it was late 1965 and 1966 that the anti-Vietnam War, anti-draft to the Vietnam War protest started at University of California, Berkeley.

  Bobby Seale

  War, Party, California

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• Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.

  Tom Hayden

  War, White, House

  Tom Hayden (2008). “Writings For A Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader”, City Lights Publishers

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• Vietnam remains an underdeveloped economy with a high poverty incidence, ... party, people and army will continue to stand united and ... turn Vietnam into a developed country in the coming decades.

  Tran ?uc Luong

  Country, War, Party

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• Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

  Nicholas Stern

  New York, Islands, Years

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• The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.

  Terence McKenna

  Real, War, Mean

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• We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  War, Tired, Simple

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• 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

  Education, War, Memorial

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• Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.

  R. W. Apple

  Fighting, Echoes, Two

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• When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

  Karl Marlantes

  War, Writing, Feet

  "A Vietnam Epic Uncovers Old Wounds: An Interview with Karl Marlantes". Interview with Evan James, www.motherjones.com. April 30, 2010.

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• In April 1975 I was born and the Vietnam War ended. I could not let any American die in war before seeing an episode of Scrubs.

  Zach Braff

  War, April, Episodes

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• 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

  Daze, Kind, Remember

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• I wonder if it changes the nature of a society for beauty to be so common. Maybe in Vietnam "She has a wonderful personality" really means something. But I couldnt figure out a polite way to ask.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Love, Mean, Personality

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty”, p.324, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The more innocuous the name of a weapon, the more hideous its impact. Some of the most horrific weapons of the Vietnam era were named Bambi, Infant, Daisycutter, Grasshopper, and Agent Orange. Nor is the trend new: From the past we have Mustard Gas, Angel Chasers [two can-nonballs linked with a chain for added destruction], and the Peacemaker, to name a few.)

  Paul Dickson

  Angel, Past, Impact

  "The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects".

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• During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Country, War, Artist

  "Vonnegut at 80". Interview with David Hoppe, www.nuvo.net. January 1, 2003.

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