George McGovern Quotes - Page 3

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

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 still love to go back to Mitchell [his home town] and wander up and down those streets. It just kind of reassures me again that there is a place that I know thoroughly, where the roots are deep. Everything had a place, a specific definition.

It's nice not to have to worry about constituents.

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.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

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

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

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

I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You never fully get over [losing a presidential campaign]. But I've had a good life. I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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

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

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

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

If Reagan wins, I'd sell the farm and buy a bomb shelter.

I didn't know a damned thing about mental illness and neither did anyone around me.

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

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

This dogged, same track approach (by the NCI) is even more astonishing.