George McGovern Quotes

It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union's most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House.

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, ... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

I was tired. I hadn't slept eight hours in two, three years. I lived on four, five hours of sleep. You can do it during a campaign because thousands are screaming for you. You're getting adrenaline shots each day. Then the campaign ends, and there are no more shots.

I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not ... You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.

I am 1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket.

We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it ... I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.

For 50 years, the Republicans have been accusing the Democrats of being soft on national security.

One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.

Somehow politicians have become convinced that negative campaigning pays off in elections.

The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early.

I hope someday we will be able to proclaim that we have banished hunger in the United States, and that we've been able to bring nutrition and health to the whole world.

I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.

If Reagan wins, I'd sell the farm and buy a bomb shelter.

And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.

My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad.

Every once in a while, I run into somebody who tells me that she met her husband in my campaign or a husband who says, I met my wife. I have to tell you, I caused a few divorces too.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

Reaganism is not only at odds with the Judeo-Christian heritage, it will not work.

Every program that ever helped working people, from rural electrification to Medicare, was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. When people tell me they don't like liberals, I ask, "Do you like Social Security? If so, then shut up!"

It's nice not to have to worry about constituents.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

I'm a movie buff.

When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day.

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

Every Senator in this Chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This Chamber reeks of blood.

I seek the presidency because I believe deeply in the American promise and can no longer accept the diminishing of that promise.

The longer the title, the less important the job.

If you're Iran's minister of defense, I think you'd try to develop at least one nuclear weapon to save yourself from what happened to Iraq.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward. Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world. And let us be joyful in the homecoming ...

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.

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

Never say anything that, down inside, you think is wrong.

I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie.

It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.

I have to have a passion in my life.

I wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

We have the resources (to end hunger), we know what has to be done, and it's something that can be achieved at a rather modest cost

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.

You don't run for the presidency out of nostalgia.

I never even had the time to read novels.

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics.

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

This total failure to address the diet/cancer relationship is most disturbing to ... those ... informed ...

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.

It's possible to dazzle a crowd if you really work at it. But that is no qualification for leadership. Hitler was a master of crowds.

Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others ... It means standing up for people who have been kept down ...

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

I didn't know a damned thing about mental illness and neither did anyone around me.

I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.

Don't throw away your conscience.

I'm constantly meeting people who said that they cast their first vote for me, or that they cut their eye teeth on the 1972 campaign, or that they didn't vote for me but admire my positions.

It's a tough thing, to know what to do about a war that deep in your gut you feel is wrong and yet watch your peers going off to fight in that war.

I would not plan to base my campaign primarily on opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.

I think the country's getting disgusted with Washington partly because of the decline of civility in government.

It can take greater courage to stand in opposition to the views of your neighbors or nation than to confront an enemy in combat.

I suppose politicians have always wanted to get re-elected, but there's a kind of a feeling now that if you just discredit your opposition, it makes it easier for you to win. I don't think that's necessarily true.

And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.

Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way - and I did.

Now, I simply do what I want.

Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'

Pay attention to the hungry, both in this country and around the world. Pay attention to the poor. Pay attention to our responsibilities for world peace. We are our brother's keeper ...

For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.