George McGovern
40 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward."
"Four years later, another antiwar Democrat managed to win the nomination. Senator George McGovern had flown thirty-five bombing missions against the Nazis in a B-24. He couldn’t be dismissed as a weakling afraid to draw blood. At the 1972 Democratic convention that summer, McGovern promised to withdraw the United States from Vietnam immediately: “[W]ithin ninety days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.” The message failed. The McGovern campaign lost all but a single state in the general election to Richard Nixon. McGovern didn’t reassess. If anything he hardened his position. Before leaving the race, McGovern made the case for what might now be described as an America First foreign policy: “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation.” It would be forty-four years before another presidential candidate made that point as forcefully, and he was a Republican."
"A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II... with ... a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century."
"Elected to the Senate in 1962, Mr. McGovern voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate."
"My dad was a Methodist minister."
"Politics is an act of faith you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public."
"I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society."
"Democrats believe that the federal government is not our enemy, it's our partner."
"I think the country's getting disgusted with Washington partly because of the decline of civility in government."
"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."
"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 think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American."
"I seek to call America home to those principles that gave us birth."
"From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America."
"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 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."
"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 fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
"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 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."
"Politics is an act of faith you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public."
"Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills."
"I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society."