War Protests Quotes

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.

When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.

Vietnam in America was truly a second Civil War.

We had the Vietnam War in the '60s, and there was a draft. The students didn't believe in it, and it unified them.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Vietnam is the Liberals' favorite was because America lost

Philadelphia reflected the national turmoil over race and the Vietnam War, often exploding on my watch.

By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.

I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.

I'm from the Vietnam generation. I didn't serve.

I remember being a kid and the Vietnam War was huge and looking at Watergate.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.

How dare the smooth talkers, the clever official blabbers, open their mouths and boast of progress. . . . Here they hold jubilant peace conferences in which they talk against war. . . . But the same righteous Governments, who are so nobly, industriously active to establish the eternal peace, are preparing, by their own confession, complete annihilation for six million people, and there is nobody, except the doomed themselves, to raise his voice in protest although this is a worse crime than any war . . .

HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U. S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES

You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street…. They don’t go to school because they are going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.

My parents were activists and my mother was hugely involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests.

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible.

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.

He [Johnny Cash] was so fragile. We invaded Iraq in March, and he died in September. And because his health was so fragile, he couldn't take the controversy of making a public statement against the war. He knew that people were rabid. They attacked me mercilessly after I did the press conference with Musicians United to Win Without War. He knew that he couldn't tolerate that.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.