Vietnam Quotes - Page 24

• There is a residual sense for me, having grown up in the early '70s, that I did not know I had, which was a sense that the military are different than I. Because there was such a divide between the military world - and there still is, because there's no draft - and the civilian world is one of the rotten harvests of the Vietnam War, was this sort of bifurcation of America in that way.

  Stephen Colbert

  Military, War, America

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• [After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Reactions, Type, Intervention

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• When John Kennedy was assassinated I was twenty-three, a stockbroker on Wall Street and married, and I never ever thought that politics would be anything that I would be a part of. But I realized that I had to get involved. Then, when Martin Luther King was assassinated and the Vietnam War was raging, I felt that my world was falling apart. I had these two beautiful children - three and one - and I just said, "I have to make it better."

  Barbara Boxer

  Beautiful, Kings, Children

  Source: progressive.org

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• Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.

  Ron Paul

  War, Party, Thinking

  The Republicans' First Presidential Candidates Debate, www.nytimes.com. May 3, 2007.

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• 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

  Goal, Way, Communism

  "Dances with Wolfe" by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. January 20, 2008.

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• When the soldiers came home from Vietnam, there were no parades, no celebrations. So they built the Vietnam Memorial for themselves.

  William Westmoreland

  Inspiring, Memories, Military

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• When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.

  Noam Chomsky

  Zero, War, Rights

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The 50,000 Korean mercenaries we had in Vietnam were professional killers and just massacred people outright. And the American army did plenty of that too, but it couldn't take it after awhile. It's not the kind of job you can give to conscripts who are not trained to be murderers.

  Noam Chomsky

  Jobs, Army, People

  Source: chomsky.info

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• At the beginning of his administration, Reagan tried set the basis for American military intervention in El Salvador - which is about what Kennedy did when he came into office in regard to Vietnam. Well, when Kennedy tried it in Vietnam, it just worked like a dream. Virtually nobody opposed American bombing of South Vietnam in 1962. It was not an issue. But when Reagan began to talk of involving American forces in El Salvador there was a huge popular uproar. And he had to choose a much more indirect way of supporting the collection of gangsters in power there. He had to back off.

  Noam Chomsky

  Dream, Military, Issues

  Source: chomsky.info

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• The Vietnam memorial is a masterpiece. The names of the dead are listed there, chronologically. Just the names.

  William Westmoreland

  Military, Names, Memorial

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• Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.

  Bill Ayers

  Spring, War, Paris

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.

  William Westmoreland

  Senior, Public Opinion, Worried

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• From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.

  Noam Chomsky

  Strong, Government, Support

  Source: chomsky.info

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• Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated.

  Arundhati Roy

  Capitalist Economy, Iran, Class

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Heart, Gun, People

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• Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.

  Lauren Graham

  Father, Thinking, Keys

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• 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

  War, Korea, Stealing

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• It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

  Salman Rushdie

  War, Johnson

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• I look and there's our boy from Vietnam and our daughter from Ethiopia, and our girl was born in Namibia, and our son is from Cambodia, and they're brothers and sisters, man. They're brothers and sisters and it's a sight for elation.

  Brad Pitt

  Girl, Daughter, Mother

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• Think about this - some of us actively fighting to remove Saddam Hussein don't agree with the cause themselves, but they're doing their duty. And it is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up once the fighting begins, unless - unless facts prove the operation wrong, as was the case in Vietnam.

  Bill O'Reilly

  Fighting, Thinking, Hussein

  "Made a Mistake". "Talking Points Memo" with Bill O'Reilly, www.foxnews.com. March 3, 2003.

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• To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam and it's just as awful as anything else.

  Marilyn Manson

  Awful, Columbine

  "Q&A: A Conversation With Marilyn Manson and Ray Manzarek". Interview with Steve Baltin, www.rollingstone.com. ugust 16, 2012.

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• When I first came to Washington in the 1960s, even at the height of the Vietnam War, until the end there in '68 there was a certain climate of cooperation. And then in the late sixties and in through the seventies, politics began getting more mean. And then from the eighties on it seemed to be institutionalized, this personal attack business. And I just hate it.

  William J. Clinton

  War, Hate, Mean

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• I think the Republicans and conservatives generally were alienated by America's unsuccessful effort in Vietnam, and a lot of them, as Henry Kissinger admitted the other day, never got over President Nixon's impeachment, and didn't think, even though there was a pattern of illegal conduct there, sanctioned by the White House and proved by the tapes and other documentary evidence and testimony, they didn't believe that the impeachment was justified, and they didn't think he should have resigned.

  William J. Clinton

  Believe, Thinking, Should Have

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• The future is now! Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities!

  Jim Carrey

  Home, Wrestling, Phones

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• The Quiet American is anti the people who took them into the Vietnam War.

  Michael Caine

  War, People, Quiet

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