I seek to call America home to those principles that gave us birth.
— George McGovern
Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.
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. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.
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.
People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.
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.
For 50 years, the Republicans have been accusing the Democrats of being soft on national security.
Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'
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 have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.
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.
From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.
One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.
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 am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.
It's nice not to have to worry about constituents.
I make one pledge above all others - to seek and speak the truth with all the resources of mind and spirit I command.
I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
I'm a movie buff.
My father was a clergyman and always said: 'Hate the sin but love the sinner.'
When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.
There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war.
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.
Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.
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.
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.
You don't run for the presidency out of nostalgia.
At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early.
I would not plan to base my campaign primarily on opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.
I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.
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'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 never even had the time to read novels.
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.
I think the country's getting disgusted with Washington partly because of the decline of civility in government.
Somehow politicians have become convinced that negative campaigning pays off in elections.
Democrats believe that the federal government is not our enemy, it's our partner.
I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.
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.
My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad.
When I was small, my most serious handicap was a painful bashfulness in the presence of strangers.
When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.
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 think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.
As an American, I want our forces to prevail.
I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.
I have to have a passion in my life.
Now, I simply do what I want.
