Top 350 Vietnam Quotes

My father, a Vietnam War pilot, used to tell me that the only really bad decisions are the ones you stick to even when you get facts that support a change in the mission.

East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

I’ve been to all these places all over the world: Portugal, Vietnam, you name it.

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon’s urgings for me to go there.

From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.

‘Flappy Bird’ was one of those phenomena. If we could all build one now, we would. Probably a bunch of us are trying. Those kinds of games are interesting. Rumor has it he was making $50,000 a day just from advertising, which is great, especially given the cost of living in Vietnam.

We didn’t lose Vietnam. We quit Vietnam.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it’s not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

We have to face up to the fact that five administrations have lied to us about Vietnam.

I returned to Vietnam in ’94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so.

I’m from the Vietnam generation.

Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.

As Vietnam opens its markets and strengthens fundamental rights, the relationship between our nations will continue to grow – to the benefit of both our citizens.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

My mind-set is Munich. Most of my generation’s is Vietnam.

From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career.

I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them – active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular – to try and end the war.

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam.

The Beatles and the Stones had Elvis and Hollywood, but when it came to my generation America meant Richard Nixon and Vietnam.

Henry Kissinger spent years negotiating the terms of our surrender there and ended up with a deal that he could have gotten on the first day he went to work in the Nixon White House – the Americans leave and North Vietnam wins.

My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years. I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country.

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.

Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know.

Canada should always open its doors to those who are oppressed or in cases of emergency. When Canada offered refuge to 50,000 boat people in Vietnam in the 1970s, I was particularly proud to be Canadian.

My opposition to the Vietnam War. I was the first Hollywood actor to speak out against it.

All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military’s interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.

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.

My father left us when I was 10, so I had to make enough money for us to be able to live in a house because my brother went in the service during Vietnam and I was sole support of my mother. And she had no skills, really, except to clean other people’s houses. So I had to have a bunch of jobs, you know, as well as music.

In 1975, the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with U.S. helicopters seeking to rescue leading U.S. personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.

My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh.

He’s a novice, but he’s had these – he’s experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started – he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam.

I’m not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I’m going to say I’m opposed to war. But I’m also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.

Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush – just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.

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

If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.

I joined the People’s Armed Forces in 1961 to 1984, and I was also a soldier in the southern battle of Vietnam during the resistance against the Americans. I went to the battlefield in order to regain national independence.

If you have a choice between buying something in Vietnam or China or buying something made in Virginia, why not buy it from people in Virginia? A lot of times, it’s not much more expensive or may even be less.

In Hue, Vietnam, we had savory rice pancakes with crumbled shrimp and pork rinds. I’ve still never had a version as good.

McNamara’s plea was that he had no idea that Vietnam had a history of longing for self-determination, a history of resisting foreign invasion.

I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.

Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush’s ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.

One of my uncles was actually a sapper who cleared land mines for Anzacs, Australian soldiers, and we had to flee Vietnam. There were 40 of us on a 9-meter fishing boat. We were at sea for five days, a very perilous journey. We were attacked by pirates twice.

Any of these Vietnam vets that have been there and know the deal, they don’t feel that any Hollywood endeavor about the Vietnam era has ever gotten it right yet.

Senator Albert Gore Sr. was one of the first outspoken critics of the Vietnam War.

Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there.

President Obama has made the Asia Pacific region a focus of his foreign policy, and Vietnam – a large, growing economy in the heart of Southeast Asia – is critical to those efforts.

Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline.

Well, I think everybody’s a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

My father fought alongside Aussie and U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we’re going down a rabbit hole once again – and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I’ve done some damn good here!

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

Vietnam ended a failure: repeatedly, to me, Kissinger described it as his greatest, and most persistent regret. But Congress was more to blame than Kissinger.