George McGovern

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

I have to have a passion in my life.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

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.

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

I would not plan to base my campaign primarily on opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.

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

It's nice not to have to worry about constituents.

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 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.

I'm a movie buff.

My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad.

I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.

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've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Now, I simply do what I want.

I move ahead, I live.

I am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.

I never even had the time to read novels.

I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

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 good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie.

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

The longer the title, the less important the job.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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 met my wife in South Dakota.

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'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.

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.

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.

When I was small, my most serious handicap was a painful bashfulness in the presence of strangers.

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

One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.