Quotes from George McGovern

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

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 a movie buff.

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

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

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.

Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way - and I did.

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

Pay attention to the hungry, both in this country and around the world. Pay attention to the poor. Pay attention to our responsibilities for world peace. We are our brother's keeper.

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

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

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.

At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early.

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

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

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

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

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

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.

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

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