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.
George McGovern
The longer the title, the less important the job.
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
I make one pledge above all others - to seek and speak the truth with all the resources of mind and spirit I command.
I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.
It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.
I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.
Somehow politicians have become convinced that negative campaigning pays off in elections.
I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.
My father was a clergyman and always said: 'Hate the sin but love the sinner.'
I am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.
I think the country's getting disgusted with Washington partly because of the decline of civility in government.
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.
I seek the presidency because I believe deeply in the American promise and can no longer accept the diminishing of that promise.
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.
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 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.
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 am 1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket.
I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie.
I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.
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.
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.
People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American 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.
Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.
The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
No man should advocate a course in private that he's ashamed to admit in public.
My dad was a Methodist minister.
I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.
I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.
I move ahead, I live.
I met my wife in South Dakota.
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 never even had the time to read novels.
It's nice not to have to worry about constituents.
Now, I simply do what I want.
I have to have a passion in my life.
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 was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.
One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.
As an American, I want our forces to prevail.
I would not plan to base my campaign primarily on opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.
It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.
At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early.
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.
You don't run for the presidency out of nostalgia.
