Top 44 George McGovern Quotes

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.

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

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 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.

You know, sometimes, when they say you’re ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.

My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad.

I have to have a passion in my life.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

I hope I live long enough to see every hungry school child in the world being fed under the so-called McGovern-Dole program.

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

I move ahead, I live.

Democrats believe that the federal government is not our enemy, it’s our partner.

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

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

I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.

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

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

The longer the title, the less important the job.

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

You don’t run for the presidency out of nostalgia.

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

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

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 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’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.

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

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

I was tired. I hadn’t slept eight hours in two, three years. I lived on four, five hours of sleep. You can do it during a campaign because thousands are screaming for you. You’re getting adrenaline shots each day. Then the campaign ends, and there are no more shots.

I seek the presidency because I believe deeply in the American promise and can no longer accept the diminishing of that promise.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

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 met my wife in South Dakota.