Vietnam War Quotations

You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.

--Ho Chi Minh to the French, late 1940s

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, 1954

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place. --John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity. --Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. --Gen. Curtis LeMay, May 1964

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. --Lyndon Johnson, Oct. 1964

We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. --Ronald Reagan, 1964

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas. --Ronald Reagan, 1965

I see light at the end of the tunnel. --Walt W. Rostow, National Security Adviser, Dec. 1967

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture--aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere. --Stephen Vizinczey, 1968

Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. --Richard M. Nixon, 1969

I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war. --Richard Nixon, Oct. 1969

This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart. --Sen. Frank Church, May 1970

By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels' wives. --Frances Fitzgerald, 1972

We believe that peace is at hand. --Henry Kissinger, Oct. 1972

You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam. --Richard Nixon in a letter to President Thieu, Jan. 1973

If the Americans do not want to support us anymore, let them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises! --Nguyen Van Thieu, April 1975

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, 1975

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world. --Gerald Ford, April 1975

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods. --Michael Herr, 1977

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, 1979

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish. --Henry Kissinger, 1979

It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause. --Ronald Reagan, Oct. 1980

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb. --Philip Caputo, 1982

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America. --Myra MacPherson, 1984

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country--it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase. --James Fenton, 1985

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. --Richard M. Nixon, 1985

The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world. --Jean Baudrillard, 1986

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, 1986

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies. --Benjamin Spock, 1988

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, 1989

VietnamWar.net

Vietnam War Books at Amazon

Vietnam War Destinations, Part 1

Vietnam War Destinations, Part 2

Vietnam War Destinations, Part 3

Vietnam War Destinations, Part 4

The Literary Hootch, Part 1

The Literary Hootch, Part 2

The Literary Hootch, Part 3

Vietnam War History, Part 1

Vietnam War History, Part 2

Vietnam War History, Part 3

Vietnam War History, Part 4

Vietnam War Research Material, Part 1

Vietnam War Research Material, Part 2

Vietnam War Research Material, Part 3

Vietnam War Research Material, Part 4

Vietnam War Humor

The Media

Vietnam War Quiz

Vietnam War Quotations

Allies

Anti-War

Political and Government Figures

Trips to Vietnam

The Vietnamese

Women

Vietnam War Films

Vietnam War Fiction

Civil War Films

World War I Films

World War II Films (Part 1)

World War II Films (Part 2)

Korean War Films

Women Writers

Vietnam War Short Stories

Military Leaders

Memorials

Organizations

Vietnam War Poetry

The Wall

African-American Soldiers

Vietnam War Books, Part 1

Vietnam War Books, Part 2

World War II Films (Part 1)

World War II Films (Part 2)

Memories Are Like Clouds

A Saigon Party:
And Other Vietnam War Short Stories

MemorableQuotations.com

Memories Are Like Clouds

A Saigon Party:
And Other Vietnam War Short Stories

General Creighton Abrams

Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)

Bao Dai

McGeorge Bundy

Ellsworth Bunker

Declaration of Independence
of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam
Ho Chi Minh's Speech,
Ba Dinh Square, September 2, 1945

Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Peace Proposal

Pham Van Dong

DRVN

Military-Industrial Complex Speech,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidential Press Conference, April 7, 1954

Eisenhower's Letter of Support
to Ngo Dinh Diem

President Ford's Speech
on the Fall of Vietnam, 24 April 1975

French Indochina

J. William Fulbright Testifies
on China and Vietnam, 1966

Vo Nguyen Giap

A History of the 58th Infantry Platoon (Scout Dog)

The Ho Chi Minh Trail

Inaugural Address,
President John F. Kennedy,
Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961

President Lyndon B. Johnson's Address
at Johns Hopkins University:
"Peace Without Conquest" April 7, 1965

President Johnson on U.S. Aims in Vietnam

Nguyen Cao Ky

Edward Lansdale

Letter from President Nixon
to President Nguyen Van Thieu
of the Republic of Vietnam
January 5, 1973

Richard Milhous Nixon's
First Inaugural Address,
January 20, 1969

President Nixon's
"Silent Majority" Speech

Excerpts from the Paris Accords

Peace Proposal
of the Provisional Revolutionary Government
of the Republic of South Viet Nam

South Vietnam

Oliver Stone

Nguyen Van Thieu

Vietnamization

A Shot and a Wound
by David A. Willson

Another Vietnam War Story or Two
by David A. Willson

The Assault
by J.E. Colussi

That Year In Saigon:
A Screenplay

Barbie and Ken
Experience the War

A Pedicab Driver
Peddles Through History

A CIA Hired Wife
Bares Her Soul

The Vietnamese Rock Star
Interview on AFVN

Yolanda's Favorite Beggar

Saigon Rumors

General Westmoreland's Houseboy
(and VC Spy) Talks

The Library Card

A Saigon Warrior's Journal

Memorable Quotations:
African-American Writers (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
American Humorists and Wits (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
American Presidents of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
American Southern Writers (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Famous Women of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
French Writers of the Past (Kindle Book and Paperback)

Memorable Quotations:
Great American Writers (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Historians of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Journalists of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Military Leaders of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Novelists of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Politicians of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Pulitzer Prize Winners of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Religious Leaders of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Short Story Writers of the Past (Kindle Book)

Memorable Quotations:
Statesmen of the Past (Kindle Book)

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