George McGovern Quotes

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valor and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war - that it is fought to be won --- has been forgotten.

In real life, it's war, and war's not entertainment. War is 'old men lying and young men dying' kind of deal. That's a saying; I didn't make that up.

Im sick and tired of old men sitting around in air conditioned rooms here in Washington, dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

Sending our youth to war is wrong.

The ground was strewn with the dead, the dying, and the wounded—here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in his head, another with an arm shot off, and hundreds wounded in nearly all the various parts of the body.

It's always the old to lead us to the war It's always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun Tell me is it worth it all.

The generals were fighting machine guns with the breasts of gallant men.

My message was one of death for young men. How odd it is to applaud that.

I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, 'Let's go fight and win it all back!' But at what price? What is the cost? It's another story of lives and land. And I won't do it.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

You've gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations, but precious few images.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.