George McGovern Quotes

My husband and brother—in—law had been treacherously killed with either the official or unofficial blessing of the American government… No one can seriously believe in the disclaimer that the Americans have nothing to do with the present situation in Vietnam.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

You're bombing that little piss-ant country up there [Vietnam], and you think you can blow them up. You've been doing this all the time. It's a bunch of crap about wanting to negotiate.

Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

Obama is making a choice now that will lead to the deaths of many thousands of civilians in Afghanistan by American hands. By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man. But those standards aren't good enough. He's in a position either to kill or not to kill, and he's made the decision to kill.

In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

The problem is that the Iraqi people are facing atrocities from both sides - Zarqawi and also the American troops at times. The Zarqawi groups uses car bombs, the Americans use other bombs. You also know what they do in the prisons.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

Hamas, they are using civilians' lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate.

54,000 Latin American soldiers graduated from the School of the Americas since 1986. These soldiers are known to commit atrocities and execute torture techniques

It [the Vietnam War] is worse than immoral. It's a mistake.

I don’t care how precise your bombs and weapons of war are. When you set them off, innocent people will die.

If women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

It is not possible to teach an entire generation to bomb and destroy others in an undeclared, unjustified war abroad without paying the price in the derangement of our own society.

In the French war in Algeria, we had a Abu Ghraib every single week. But we did not have a Seymour Hirsh and a press like you did, and it was not much written in our press or by our intellectuals..

By burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting. The Arabs and Kurds now know what real bombing is like; in casualties and damage, they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.

I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's 'dispatching' a few 'treacherous savages'? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the war would have been over long ago. Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war. For starters, all Americans who had recently petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Philippines should be dragged out of their homes and lynched

Meanwhile “our” troops during the past month, have been again at their congenial occupation of slaughtering native children and burning villages

I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.