Vietnam War Quotes

• 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.

  John F. Kerry

  Military, War, Struggle

  54 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Inspirational, Motivational, Military

  Quoted in Montreal Gazette, 16 May 1975

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• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Peace, Military, War

  Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 1953

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• No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Military, War, Misunderstood

  "No More Vietnams". Book by Richard M. Nixon, 1985.

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• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Wisdom, Peace, Kings

  "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 16 Apr. 1963

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• All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

  Michael Herr

  Military, Thinking, People

  1989 In the Observer, 15 Jan.

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• Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

  John F. Kennedy

  Vietnam, Problem, Credible

  1961 Attributed remark to journalist James Reston, following Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev, Jun.

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• Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Military, War, Taught Us

  "Quote for the Day II". The year 1979 quote, www.theatlantic.com. January 09, 2007.

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• Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

  Omar N. Bradley

  War, Evil, Nuclear Missiles

  19 Copy quote

• How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

  John F. Kerry

  Mistake, Men, Vietnam

  Testimony before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 22 Apr. 1971

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• Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

  Michael Herr

  War, Childhood, Vietnam

  Dispatches ch. 3 (1977)

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• Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

  Dalton Trumbo

  Morning, War, Coffee

  Dalton Trumbo (2007). “Johnny Got His Gun”, p.23, Kensington Publishing Corp.

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• I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

  Richard M. Nixon

  War, President, Vietnam

  3 Copy quote

• There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

  Edward Abbey

  Veterans Day, Peace, War

  Edward Abbey (1998). “The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel”, p.140, Macmillan

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• This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.

  Frank Church

  Country, War, Generations

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• America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help-because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Hurt, War, Heart

  53 Copy quote

• The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

  Ho Chi Minh

  Pregnancy, Men, People

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

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• Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies.

  John F. Kennedy

  War, Commitment, Risk

  4 Copy quote

• You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, Military, Vietnam

  News conference, 7 Apr. 1954

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• We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.

  George McGovern

  Country, Son, Years

  4 Copy quote

• Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Inspirational, Military, War

  Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on War”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

  Hermann Goring

  Country, Peace, Freedom

  Quoted in Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (1947).

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• We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Home, Boys, Asian

  Speech at Akron University, Akron, Ohio, 21 Oct. 1964

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• My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power - not with ground forces.

  Curtis LeMay

  Military, Age, Vietnam

  "Mission With LeMay: My Story". Book by Curtis E LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor, p. 565, 1965.

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• This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Children, War, Military

  Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 1953

  26 Copy quote

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