George McGovern Quotes

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

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

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

In July of 2004, I came out strongly against the war with Iraq because it was going to destabilize the Middle East.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

The ongoing strife in Iraq, and the billions of dollars that the President is seeking to continue that war, give me little comfort that this Administration has learned from its mistakes in Iraq.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.

The U.S. Forces are winning in Iraq. It is to be hoped that they will win at home also.

War is just one more big government program.

The Iraq war was not necessary.

I want to tell you that I think this war is a great mistake.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

In the issue war in Iraq, it was very clear to me that the policies that were being espoused by neoconservatives were totally devoid of substance - but they marketed it wonderfully.

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.

I’m not opposed to all wars; just dumb wars.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

Word War III is about to start and we cannot change the position on Vietnam.

History will show that perhaps we did not think through the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. But here we are.

You help us pay for the war we’ll fight; we’ll launch it while you’re asleep at night. We don’t need friends all around the world; We’ll buy our friends with our flag unfurled, And spread our arms on a global scale To show the world that we still prevail. Oh, we’re not leaders inspiring peace, But we’re in power as the world’s police. So pay your tax for our little war, And we’ll not ask for any more. This year!

Vietnam was not a war for us to be in …. It was a useless war.

No nation has ever ridden to superpower status except on a tide of war and that includes the United States.