Quotes from George McGovern

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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.

The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 standard.

But it is hazardous and, I believe, counterproductive to become frozen in time by an obsession with past wrongs and errors.

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.

Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave... This chamber reeks of blood... it does not take any courage at all for a Congressman or a Senator or a President to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Viet Nam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.

Every program that ever helped working people, from rural electrification to Medicare, was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives.

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

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

When people ask if the United States can afford to place on trial the president, if the system can stand impeachment, my answer is, "Can we stand anything else?

It's possible to dazzle a crowd if you really work at it. But that is no qualification for leadership. Hitler was a master of crowds.