Vietnam Quotes - Page 8

• Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs or 'death professions.

  Warren Farrell

  Jobs, War, Men

  Warren Farrell (1994). “The myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex”

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• By the 1970s, the American woman was being called 'liberated' or 'superwoman' while the American man was being called 'baby killer' if he fought in Vietnam, 'traitor' if he protested, or 'apathetic' if he did neither. Even men who came home paraplegics were literally spit on.

  Warren Farrell

  Baby, Home, Men

  Warren Farrell (1994). “The myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex”

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• People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn’t feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.

  Sam Shepard

  Flower, Sky, Race Riots

  Interview with Michael Almereyda, www.interviewmagazine.com. Published.

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• Latin American countries are part of the West and that it is reasonable to expect a certain degree of openness in their societies that we do not demand of, say, China or Vietnam.

  Mark Falcoff

  Country, Latin, Degrees

  "Post-Fidel Plans for U.S.-Cuba Relations, Migration Policy". Live chat, www.washingtonpost.com. August 2, 2007.

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• I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.

  John Pilger

  Winning, Two, Pockets

  "This much I know". Interview with Tom Templeton, www.theguardian.com. November 13, 2005.

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• The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.

  Ralph Peters

  Daughter, Son, People

  Ralph Peters (2004). “Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World”, p.287, Stackpole Books

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• The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas. It occupies Vietnam now. They occupy them by sending soldiers there, by sending policeman there. The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism. The gun in the establishment's hand makes the establishment secure in its exploitation.

  Huey Newton

  Military, War, Gun

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• It has been said that the United States was deceived into entering and expanding the Vietnam War by its own overoptimistic propaganda. The record suggests, however, that the policy-makers stayed in Vietnam not so much because of overly optimistic hopes of winning ... as because of overly pessimistic assessments of the consequences of losing.

  Jonathan Schell

  War, Optimistic, Winning

  Jonathan Schell (1987). “The real war: the classic reporting on the Vietnam War with a new essay”, Pantheon

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• In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I'm not valourising Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people - it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem - the women have just been pushed back into their burqas - and not by choice.

  Arundhati Roy

  Country, War, Museums

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• It is a key fact about American policy in Vietnam that the withdrawel of American troops was built into it from the start. None of the presidents who waged war in Vietnam contemplated an open-ended campaign; all promised the public that American troops would be able to leave in the not-too-remote future. The promise of withdrawel precluded a policy of occupation of the traditional colonial sort, in which a great power simply imposes its will on a small one indefinitely.

  Jonathan Schell

  War, Keys, Promise

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• It's all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that's the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured...in a disappeared history.

  Arundhati Roy

  Latin, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Korea

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.

  Robert McNamara

  Loss, Tests, Hypothesis

  "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara". Documentary, August 30, 2003.

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• I was a grunt, walking around in the jungle of Vietnam, trying not to find the enemy. Because I am so big, they were going to give me either a heavy radio or a huge machine gun to carry. I carried a radio.

  Bob Gunton

  Gun, Giving, Enemy

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World.

  John Pilger

  Real, School, People

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• 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.

  Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

  War, Philippines, World

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• The consequences of President Johnsons campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself.

  Eric Alterman

  Military, Party, Deception

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• [Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives.

  Oscar Levant

  Islands, Government, Desert

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• As for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and uncivil disobedients among the young, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Zoos, Hippie, Black

  Spiro T. Agnew (1970). “The real Spiro Agnew: commonsense quotations of a household word”, Pelican Publishing Company

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• Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Peace, War, Boys

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• The true lesson of the Vietnam War is: certainty of purpose and ruthlessness of execution win wars.

  Ronald Reagan

  Peace, War, Winning

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• But on the other hand, in discussion and debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I've repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things.

  Noam Chomsky

  Hands, Issues, People

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• People would always say horror movies always thrive during times of war; that's just what people would say. And I don't know if they thrived during World War II or Vietnam, but I thought that's kind of strange, why would that happen. I don't know if people rearrange their priorities; in good times, they freak out and start pointing the fingers at video games and TV, but when horrible things are happening in the world, a horror movie just seems a little ridiculous.

  Rob Zombie

  War, Games, People

  "Rob Zombie Goes Six Feet Under with The Devil's Rejects". Interview with Movieweb, movieweb.com. July 20, 2005.

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• I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.

  Maya Lin

  Cutting, Men, Land

  Quoted in Smithsonian Magazine, Aug. 1996

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• Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

  Karl Marlantes

  War, Metaphor, Abandoned

  "A Vietnam Epic Uncovers Old Wounds: An Interview with Karl Marlantes". Interview with Evan James, www.motherjones.com. April 30, 2010.

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• And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.

  Karl Marlantes

  Military, Stress, Thinking

  "'Matterhorn' Author On What It's Like 'To Go To War'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. August 30, 2011.

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