Whit Stillman Quotes

THIS WILL BE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION…. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FLIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST…. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED A LESSON. SAIGON SIGNING OFF.

I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

Vietnam was God’s instrument for bringing the American empire to its knees.

War is not won by victory.

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.

That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

The unraveling that I experienced much earlier in the Vietnam war than many people think, was due to the immediate foxhole experiences. But once I got back home and began to follow the war on TV and in the press I began to see this enormous con game - I can't think of any other word for it - that government and the military was foisting on the American people, especially on the young men of my generation, and even worse, the young men of my generation who weren't particularly economically or intellectually privileged.

Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.

This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.

During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.

Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together.

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?" - Quellcrist Falconer

Pentagon records show that at least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. Army have deserted since the Iraq war began. Hey, at least somebody has an exit strategy.

The same people that are with me for not going to Vietnam because I saved them and their children.The same people will give me hell if I turn to them and say, 'let's free my people now'.They're with me on one part of my beliefs about the war, that's all. Not for my freedom.