Quotes About History

We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the '60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.

In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like 'Sands of Iwo Jima' and there was this, you know - after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.

Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.

For many Americans, 'Vietnam' is a word associated with war and the extraordinarily complex history between our countries. But since normalization began, the U.S. and Vietnam have steadily built bonds of partnership, demonstrating that we can recognize history without being imprisoned by it.

When I was growing up, it was a bad time to be in the military. It was the time of Vietnam, but I was never called up.

India and Vietnam are old civilizations. We have ancient cultural and spiritual connections.

I'm from Texas, so I'm an LBJ fan. He passed more civil-rights bills than any other president. He made a mistake in Vietnam, but who didn't?

If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.

My parents are both war veterans; they met in Vietnam. They were involved in a war that they absolutely disagreed with.

I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of China.

Anyway, in 1966, Daddy had started to attack Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson was a good man. Even though he was a Southern conservative, Lyndon Johnson passed more civil-rights legislation than any other president in history.

We have to face up to the fact that five administrations have lied to us about Vietnam.

I'm from the Vietnam generation.

East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

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

I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

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.

My father fought alongside Aussie and U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War.

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.

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

The Vietnam War soured President Johnson's legacy. We still have to recognize his domestic legacy.

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.

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.