Vietnamese Quotes - Page 2

• It's a Vietnamese soup that answers the question, 'What happens when a former child soldier pours hot rain water over fish nightmares.' It's delicious and I can't stop eating it, that's what happens.

  Kyle Kinane

  Children, Rain, Water

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• The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.

  Matt Ridley

  Average, Years, Mexican

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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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• Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?

  Andrew Sullivan

  Historical, Enemy, Gains

  "Bush, McCain, Torture". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. July 02, 2008.

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• Administrators tend to lump Asians in Chicago into one group, not understanding that these kids would be fighting each other, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. We started a thing called cultural gift sharing, where everyone comes and says what his culture is, so the teachers and the administrators could understand they are different.

  Malik Yusef

  Teacher, Kids, Fighting

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America.

  Andrew Lam

  Sadness, America, Stories

  Andrew Lam (2010). “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres”, p.133, Heyday

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• The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

  Nick Turse

  Mistake, Boys, Apples

  Nick Turse (2013). “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”, p.256, Macmillan

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• I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Children, Military

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.... There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!' There is something wrong with that press.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Children, Ghetto, Damn You

  "We Need Martin Luther King Jr.’s Antiwar Rage Now More Than Ever" by Ja’han Jones, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 04, 2018.

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• I would think somebody like Jane Fonda and her idiot husband would be terribly ashamed and saddened that they were a part of causing us to stop helping the South Vietnamese. Now look what's happening. They're getting killed by the millions. Murdered by the millions. How the hell can she and her husband sleep at night?

  John Wayne

  Husband, Sleep, Night

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• German businesspeople have invested a great deal in our country, and trade is flourishing. We want to speed up economic cooperation. Your country is a large, important provider of aid, and it has done a great deal to reduce the poverty of many Vietnamese.

  Nguyen Minh Triet

  Country, Important, Done

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• When I came to the United States in 1975 I was eleven, and within a few months my voice broke. I recited commercials like a parrot and I got yelled at quite often. My older brother one night said, "You speak so much English when you're not supposed to, that's why your vocal chords shattered. Now you sound like a duck." I thought it was true. I went from this sweet-voiced Vietnamese kid who spoke Vietnamese and French to this craggy-voiced teenager.

  Andrew Lam

  Sweet, Brother, Teenager

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? The vice president has two duties. One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate... The other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared to being able to live for a good part of the time in the state of Arizona.

  John McCain

  Dark, Thinking, Years

  "News from CNN" with Thelma Gutierrez, www.cnn.com. May 28, 2004.

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• The influence of Sun Tzu on other North Vietnamese military strategists is harder to answer. Certainly many of the key leaders in Hanoi were aware of Sun Tzu and made use of his ideas - Vo Nguyen Giap applied many of these ideas in seeking out weak elements in the enemy's defenses, as did Truong Chinh, whose famous treatise, The Resistance Will Win (1947), cited the ideas of Mao Zedong as a model for the North Vietnamese to follow.

  William J. Duiker

  Military, Winning, Keys

  Source: www.sonshi.com

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• We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders.

  J. William Fulbright

  Mean, Trying, Tasks

  J. William Fulbright (2011). “The Arrogance of Power”, p.32, Random House

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• The way the Americans behaved created among the South Vietnamese a lot of habits, a lot of bad habits I would say.

  Bui Diem

  Way, Habit, South

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• Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

  Nat Hentoff

  Morning, Couple, War

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

  Mitali Perkins

  Girl, Strong, Character

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• When he served in China during World War II, [Ho Chi Minh] learned about Mao Zedong's tactics of guerrilla war against the Japanese (and later against Chiang Kai-shek's forces), and he translated some of Mao's works into Vietnamese. But it is clear that his own ideas on how to counter the enemy ran along the same lines.

  William J. Duiker

  War, Ideas, Enemy

  Source: www.sonshi.com

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• In the spring of 1946 [Ho Chi Minh ] signed a provisional agreement with the French representative on a compromise solution to the dispute over Vietnamese independence. Once again, he might have been naive in hoping that a compromise was really possible.

  William J. Duiker

  Spring, Agreement, Independence

  Source: www.sonshi.com

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• I see no reason to believe that the Vietnamese Communist Party will lose control over the reins of power in Vietnam. There is no organized force in the country that is capable of competing with the VCP for power. And the party still believes that it must rule by intimidation and by dominating the political scene In effect, it has abandoned that part of Ho Chi Minh's legacy that the people must be won over by persuasion rather than by force - a dictum that Ho Chi Minh did not always follow himself.

  William J. Duiker

  Country, Party, Believe

  Source: www.sonshi.com

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• Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Evil, Voting

  "Rebels Against Tyranny". Interview with Ziga Vodovnik, www.counterpunch.org. May 12, 2008.

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• The daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth the candle.

  Walter Cronkite

  Carnage, Coverage, Convince

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• The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Successful, Army, Fate

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty”, p.327, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We South Vietnamese, we are very concerned about the ah, the fact that the communists are - were very shrewd in trying to take advantage of the American presence in South Vietnam to make the propaganda that they were the only one who fought for the independence of the country and against the, only foreigners, first the French and after that the Americans.

  Bui Diem

  Country, Independence, Trying

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