George McGovern Quotations

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

It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.

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

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America. From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick - come home, America.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.

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.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

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

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

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

No man should advocate a course in private that he's ashamed to admit in public.

I always thought of myself as a moderate liberal, a fighter for peace and justice. I never thought of myself as being all that far out.

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

The longer the title, the less important the job.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war.

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

I seek to call America home to those principles that gave us birth.

When I was small, my most serious handicap was a painful bashfulness in the presence of strangers.

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.

I flew a full string of 35 combat missions over some of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. We were hitting Hitler's oil refineries, his tank factories, his aircraft factories, his railway yards. Those were our prime targets.

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.

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.

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.

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

Democrats believe that the federal government is not our enemy, it's our partner.

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

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

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.

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

I make one pledge above all others - to seek and speak the truth with all the resources of mind and spirit I command.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.

I hope I live long enough to see every hungry school child in the world being fed under the so-called McGovern-Dole program.

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

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

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.

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.

I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

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

I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie. My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

I am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.

I have to have a passion in my life.

I never even had the time to read novels.

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

I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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

My father was a clergyman and always said: 'Hate the sin but love the sinner.'

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior.

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

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.

We remember his sturdy idealism and his devotion to public good.

I'd like to see a working partnership between people your age and people my age,

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

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.

It is appropriate to meet in a church because today we're talking about what is one of the clearly most deeply moral challenges of our time.

My role tonight is to sit there and enjoy it and applaud at the appropriate places in case he says something wise,

that you only have a realistic hope of ending poverty if you can somehow curb the destruction and waste and the devastation of war.

Eli had courage in seeking to halt ill-conceived and unnecessary wars that degrade our moral standing in the world.

This is an area where we ought to begin using the funds that Congress has authorized and appropriated for this purpose instead of leaving those funds lying on the table.

There'll be no criticism of anybody that wants to jump out. I'll take you close to the field. All you have to do is jump out and pull the rip cord.

I hope Howard Dean is like George McGovern. I thought I was a pretty good candidate in 1972. It's true that I lost to Richard Nixon in the general election by a big margin. But that wasn't my mistake. That was the mistake of the voters

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

The earth has enough knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient scourge. Hunger has plagued the world for thousands of years. But ending it is a greater moral imperative now than ever before, because for the first time humanity has the instruments at hand to defeat this cruel enemy at a very reasonable cost. We have the ability to provide food for all within the next three decades.

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

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

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

Now, I simply do what I want.

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

I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being.

We are at a crossroads over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.

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

I fully endorse the millennial goals to make (hunger) history, ... Those are big goals, but it's do-able.

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.

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.

When people ask if the United States can afford to place on trial the president, if the system can stand impeachment, my answer is, "Can we stand anything else?

Don't throw away your conscience.

I still love to go back to Mitchell [his home town] and wander up and down those streets. It just kind of reassures me again that there is a place that I know thoroughly, where the roots are deep. Everything had a place, a specific definition.

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

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

I met my wife in South Dakota.

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

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.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

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.

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

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 didn't used to care about living a long time. Not that I wasn't enjoying life, but I never sat around asking how I'd get to be 100, you know. But now I want to live long enough to see every school child in the world getting a good, nutritious lunch every day.

This dogged, same track approach (by the NCI) is even more astonishing...