GEORGE MCGOVERN

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

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

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.

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.

I move ahead, I live.

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

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.

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

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.

Democrats believe that the federal government is not our enemy, it's our partner.

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

My father was a clergyman and always said: 'Hate the sin but love the sinner.'

I'm a movie buff.

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

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

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.

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior.

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 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.

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

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.