George McGovern Quotes

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.

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

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.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

Don't throw away your conscience.

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

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?

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

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

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

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 would support a Presidential candidate who pledged to take the following steps: ... At the end of the war in the Persian Gulf, press for a comprehensive Middle East settlement and for a 'new world order' based not on Pax Americana but on peace through law with a stronger U.N. and World Court.

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

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

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.

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.

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 never even had the time to read novels.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

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

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

You never fully get over [losing a presidential campaign]. But I've had a good life. I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.