Quotes By George McGovern

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

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

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

The longer the title, the less important the job.

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

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

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 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.

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

I have to have a passion in my life.

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.

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

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

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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