Best 89 quotes of George Mcgovern on MyQuotes

Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others. ... It means standing up for people who have been kept down.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.

And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.

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

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward. Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world. And let us be joyful in the homecoming.

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

Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'

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

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.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

Every program that ever helped working people, from rural electrification to Medicare, was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. When people tell me they don't like liberals, I ask, "Do you like Social Security? If so, then shut up!

Every Senator in this Chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This Chamber reeks of blood.

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

For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America. From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick - come home, America.

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

I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie.

I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie. My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

I always thought of myself as a moderate liberal, a fighter for peace and justice. I never thought of myself as being all that far out.

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

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

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

I didn't used to care about living a long time. Not that I wasn't enjoying life, but I never sat around asking how I'd get to be 100, you know. But now I want to live long enough to see every school child in the world getting a good, nutritious lunch every day.

I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being.

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.

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 fully endorse the millennial goals to make (hunger) history, ... Those are big goals, but it's do-able.

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not....You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.

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 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.

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

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 met my wife in South Dakota.

Im sick and tired of old men sitting around in air conditioned rooms here in Washington, dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

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

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.

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.

It can take greater courage to stand in opposition to the views of your neighbors or nation than to confront an enemy in combat.

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.

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

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

It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union's most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House.

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

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil,... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

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

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.