Bill Moyers Quotes

I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.

The reason why many young people in the Vietnam War era were active was their lives were threatened by the draft and they were going to perhaps be forced to go overseas and fight in an immoral war.

American GIs don't fight this unjust immoral and illegal war of Johnson's.

Senator Albert Gore Sr. was one of the first outspoken critics of the Vietnam War.

I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.

My dad was a civil rights lawyer, and he was actually defending conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

One of the things I am most proud of is refusing to serve in the military when drafted during the Vietnam War.

I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later.

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.

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.

Martin Luther King does the cause of Civil Rights a disservice by linking it with the Vietnam issue.

A lot of the idealism of the Sixties was spot on, from the environmentalism to the war to the Civil Rights movement, the women's rights movement, you name it.

'Turn to Stone' was written about the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War and the protesting that was going on and all of that. It's a song about frustration. Also, I attended Kent State.

I think that for many of us, the years of the Civil Rights movements - Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 to end the war and so forth - these were defining moment in terms of trying to hold government accountable and have a level of responsibility and truth-telling.

We went to America a few times and [Brian] Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George [Harrison] and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did.

I wouldn't choose conscientious objector and I wouldn't go to Canada. I did what Hap did and almost went to prison. I think the threw me a bone as the war was winding down, and I think they accepted my sincerity for being against that war.

The boys that were running away from America because they didn't want to get involved with the Vietnam War had come to me. They would tell me how they felt.

By 1973, John Kerry had already accused American soldiers of committing war crimes in Vietnam, thrown someone else's medals to the ground in an anti-war demonstration, and married his first heiress.

I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, 'It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'

Martin Luther King really was a safety valve for white people. Any time it appeared that the black community was on the verge of really doing what we ought to do based on having been attacked, they put Martin Luther King on television. He was always saying, "We must use nonviolence. We must overcome hate with love." White people loved that. That's why they gave him a Nobel Prize. But when Martin Luther King started condemning the Vietnam War, that's when white people turned against him.