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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The whole campaign was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

The longer the title, the less important the job.

As an American, I want our forces to prevail.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 met my wife in South Dakota.

I move ahead, I live.

I never even had the time to read novels.

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

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

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

I'm a movie buff.

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

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

I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

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.

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

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

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

My dad was a Methodist minister.

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

Now, I simply do what I want.

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

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.

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