George McGovern Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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 whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!"

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.