Eugene McCarthy Quotes

Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope.

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.

Vote against anything introduced with a "re" in it, especially reforms, reorganizations, and recodifications. This usually means going back to something that failed once and is likely to do so again.

I would not want to put him in charge of snake control in Ireland.

Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts.

You know when I first thought I might have a chance? When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.

We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it.

I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel.

This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country.

Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

The function of liberal Republicans is to shoot the wounded after battle.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Whatever is morally necessary must be made politically possible.

An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

The polls show that 10 percent of the public are ready to vote for me even though they don't know I'm running. We hope that figure won't drop when they learn I'm in the race.

Have you ever tried to split sawdust?

We don't declare war any more; we declare national defense.

The difference between Carter and [Ted] Kennedy: Carter has this vague religion which he believes in strongly, while Kennedy has this strong religion which he believes in vaguely.

Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum.

There are two ways that you can gain territory from another group. One is by conquest. That's essentially the way we took California from Mexico and ... Texas as well. But what's going on now may end up being a kind of recolonization of the Southwest, because the other way you can regain territory is by population infiltration and demographic dominance ... The United States will be faced with the problem that Canada has been faced with ... and which our system is not prepared to accommodate.

The mortician interviewing the corpses

Broken things are powerful.Things about to break are stronger still.The last shot from the brittle bow is truest.

If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency,

War is indefensible on every grounds, military and economic and diplomatic and also on moral.

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.