George McGovern quotes:

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.

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

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

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

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.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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

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

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 have to have a passion in my life.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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

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

The longer the title, the less important the job.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 met my wife in South Dakota.

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

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

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

Now, I simply do what I want.

...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...

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

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

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

Don't throw away your conscience.

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

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!"

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

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I never even had the time to read novels.

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.

Im sick and tired of old men sitting around in air conditioned rooms here in Washington, dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?