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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.