Top 55 Vietnam War Quotes

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.

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word ‘fascist’ all the time. College presidents were fascists; Vietnam War supporters were fascists. Policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists – on and on.

The men and women who served during the Vietnam War are often overlooked.

In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.

There’s a lot of history here. In terms of Asians in this country, you have a big influx after the Cultural Revolution, a big influx after the Korean War, a big influx after the Vietnam War.

At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.

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

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.

I’m a lad of the ’60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

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.

Don’t forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

I couldn’t be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.

‘Dare to Discipline’ was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.

In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after hearings exposed the F.B.I.’s egregious practice of illegally spying on civil rights leaders, black nationalists, Communists and Vietnam War protesters.

I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

I used to say, ‘Mad’ takes on both sides.’ We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. ‘Mad’ was wide open.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.

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.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn’t find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was causing people to get drafted; I had received a deferment to finish my undergraduate education, and in order to continue to get a deferment, you had to go to graduate school.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn’t qualify.

Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.

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.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era – You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn’t share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

My first professional acting job was in ‘Hair’ during the Vietnam War. So I think I’ve always been drawn to projects with a social conscience.

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.

One of the things I am most proud of is refusing to serve in the military when drafted during the Vietnam War.

I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world’s finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

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 got involved in the political arena in college, protesting the Vietnam War, and became friends with some of the activists at the University of Hawaii.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

The Vietnam War was happening, but Lubbock was… They put a pinch on it.

I didn’t see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.

In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support.

I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people’s lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn’t until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon.

In the ’50s, a lot of stories were built around radiation and the proliferation of new technology. In the ’70s, there were a lot of stories that dealt with the Vietnam War. So comic books have always been a reflection of the times we live in.

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.