Vietnam Quotes - Page 23

• 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

  Military, People, Want

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• The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

  Bill Moyers

  Running, War, Believe

  Source: progressive.org

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• I was asked in a way when Honorable Elijah Mohammed said take the step, choose between the wealth of America and the millions of dollars and the title, the ministry. So, I chose the ministry. If I was not sincere, then I would have easily went to Vietnam, boxin' exhibitions, and made a couple of cool million.

  Muhammad Ali

  Couple, America, Steps

  Source: thefederalist.com

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• There's just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Political, Independence

  Source: chomsky.info

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• The politicians in Washington just had no idea about the complexity of the situation in South Vietnam.

  William Westmoreland

  Ideas, Politician, Situation

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• No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war).

  Margo Kingston

  Country, War, Air

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• 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

  Sweat, Worst Nightmares, Terrorism

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• Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Zoos, Hippie, Patriotic

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• These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.

  Neil Sheehan

  Inspiring, Memories, Fighting

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• I think you have to take the man at his word [Donald Trump]. Is kind of an equal-opportunity insulter. He started by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. He moved on to denigrating John McCain's heroism during the Vietnam War. He has gone after people with disabilities. He has said Muslims should be kept out of our country. He certainly has gone after individual women in the media, in the political arena.

  Hillary Clinton

  Country, War, Opportunity

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• 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

  Teenage, Talking, Vanity

  FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from Nov 08, 2015

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• Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.

  Timothy Leary

  War, Hippie, Self Confidence

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• Probably after Vietnam and Watergate, there was an increasing distrust of institutions, so that Jesus was still in, but the institutional church was no longer an attraction. So, I think that the dropping of the denominational label is to become more generic, less of a threat, less of a reminder of negative stereotypes if you've walked away from church.

  Eddie Gibbs

  Jesus, Thinking, Church

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• Having gone through the civil rights struggle, having gone through the anti-Vietnam War struggle, by the time I was in my 20s, I had something that the current generation doesnt have. And that is a sense of efficacy.

  Paul Solman

  War, Struggle, Rights

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment.

  Bill Ayers

  War, Thinking, Republic

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, a misjudgment about the nature of the communist system and the unity of the communist world and the degree to which the experience of Europe could be repeated in Vietnam.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Intelligent, Europe, People

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Office, Television

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• 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

  Regret, Circles, Want

  "Historian fakes his own history" by Julian Borger, www.theguardian.com. June 19, 2001.

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• After the '30s, we said, "no more Munichs." And it got us in a lot of problems. Then we said, "No more Vietnams." Now if we say, "No more Iraqs," the next one won't be an Iraq. It will be something different. You can't learn lessons.

  Brent Scowcroft

  Iraq, Different, Lessons

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

  Orson Welles

  Marijuana, Light, Texas

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• If you get a President (Hillary) Clinton, you might well find, just as after Vietnam, that there is a retraction from Iraq and of American influence in the world. And in a couple of years the Europeans will be complaining about that too.

  John Bolton

  Couple, Iraq, Years

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The events that followed our withdrawal from Vietnam, including the plight of the boat people and the more than 1 million slaughtered by the new communist rulers of Cambodia, showed that media critics who said we were on the wrong side were mistaken.

  Richard M. Nixon

  War, Media, People

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• During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Monday, Military, War

  Ford, Gerald R. (1977). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Gerald R. Ford, 1975”, p.605, Best Books on

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• I have looked at public opinion polls in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of Marshall Plan aid. They had a very negative attitude towards the United States then. There were negative attitudes towards the United States because of Vietnam. There were negative attitudes about the United States when Reagan wanted to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles. I don't think the president should base his foreign policy on American public opinion polls, let alone foreign public opinion polls.

  John Bolton

  Attitude, Thinking, President

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  War, Character, Fate

  "The Good Word & Other Words" by Wilfrid Sheed, Penguin, (pp. 107-108), 1980.

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