Quotes By George McGovern

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

My dad was a Methodist minister.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.