Quotes By George McGovern

I have to have a passion in my life.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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