Quotes By George McGovern

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

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

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

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

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

My dad was a Methodist minister.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

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've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 move ahead, I live.

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

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

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

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.