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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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