Top 1200 Vietnam War Quotes & Sayings

We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

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.

This war in Vietnam is, I believe, a war for civilization. Certainly it is not a war of our seeking. It is a war thrust upon us and we cannot yield to tyranny.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

There are few historians who would challenge the fact that the funding of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War was accomplished by the Mandrake Mechanism through the Federal Reserve System.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.

The Vietnam War was in full swing, the Air Force wanted me and I wanted out of Flint, so three years in the USA and that fourth one spent here in Vietnam really flipped my life around.

I'm a child of the '60s, I came of age then. I went to a couple of demonstrations, and then in the late '60s when the Vietnam anti-war movement grew as the Vietnam War was heating up, I became very involved in that.

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

The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition.

My fascination with war is because my dad was in World War II, and my brother was in Vietnam.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

My parents are both war veterans; they met in Vietnam. They were involved in a war that they absolutely disagreed with.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

We understand that Nixon's aggression against Vietnam is a racist aggression, that the American war in Vietnam is a racist war, a white man's war...We deplore that you are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. We've seen photographs of American bombs and antipersonnel weapons being dropped, wantonly, accidentally perhaps, on your heads, on the heads of your comrades.

Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East.

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.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.

Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says "Bad war, good soldier." Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.

My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam war saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam war will be necessary here. I think the American people will get us out of this war.

In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like 'Sands of Iwo Jima' and there was this, you know - after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.

I think that the war on drugs is domestic Vietnam. And didn't we learn from Vietnam that, at a certain point in the war, we should stop and rethink our strategy, ask ``Why are we here, what are we doing, what's succeeded, what's failed?'' And we ought to do that with the domestic Vietnam, which is the war on drugs.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.

The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism.

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible.

Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.

Was the Vietnam conflict a war which should have, as a matter of constitutional law, required a declaration of war by Congress?

The first 'Bad Company' was a kind of reaction to the Vietnam war - or at least a reaction to how Vietnam had entered the cultural life through films and books.

When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.

Philip Jones Griffith documented the Vietnam War, and through his images that were published in Time Life Magazine, it showed me the horrors of war and at that time, I wanted to be a war photographer, based off his work.

Have you ever had any anger about President Bush - who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard - running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that, or have you been?

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.

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.

With all the arguments and discussions about the Vietnam War, what did the visual image do? It ended the war.

The Vietnam war will not be over until it ends for everyone. Over four hundred thousand U.S. veterans are still recovering from wounds inflicted on their bodies and their spirit. Sixty-three million souls in Vietnam are still suffering from their 'victory.

You go back and look at things like Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, a lot of people dying in state-sponsored arm conflict

In every major war we have fought in the 19th and 20th centuries. Americans have been asked to pay higher taxes - and nonessential programs have been cut - to support the military effort. Yet during this Iraq war, taxes have been lowered and domestic spending has climbed. In contrast to World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, for most Americans this conflict has entailed no economic sacrifice. The only people really sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families.

Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how - while it may have been a "mistake" or an "unwise effort" - the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That's standard to say. The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam.

With 450,000 U. S. troops now in Vietnam, it is time that Congress decided whether or not to declare a state of war exists with North Vietnam. Previous congressional resolutions of support provide only limited authority. Although Congress may decide that the previously approved resolution on Vietnam given President Johnson is sufficient, the issue of a declaration of war should at least be put before the Congress for decision.

During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.

For many Americans, 'Vietnam' is a word associated with war and the extraordinarily complex history between our countries. But since normalization began, the U.S. and Vietnam have steadily built bonds of partnership, demonstrating that we can recognize history without being imprisoned by it.

By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.

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.

I'm a Vietnam veteran. I was here when there was no public support, not just for the effort in Vietnam, for the mission in Vietnam, but for our men and women in uniform.

The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.

Although one of the key justifications for the Vietnam war was to prevent the spread of communism, the U.S. defeat was to produce nothing of the kind: apart from the fact that Cambodia and Laos became embroiled, the effects were essentially confined to Vietnam.

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.

I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of China.

Most of us who were opposed to the war, especially in the early '60's - the war we were opposed to was the war on South Vietnam which destroyed South Vietnam's rural society. The South was devastated. But now anyone who opposed this atrocity is regarded as having defended North Vietnam. And that's part of the effort to present the war as if it were a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam with the United States helping the South. Of course it's fabrication. But it's "official truth" now.

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.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

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.

I was 20, and my reality was that people either went to college full-time, or they were draftable. The dear friends that I went to high school with that didn't go to college eventually wound up in Vietnam, and I noticed that they came home different. I was in Ohio during the Vietnam War era.