Eugene McCarthy Quotes

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.”

— Eugene McCarthy

I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel.

— Eugene McCarthy

“The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.”

— Eugene McCarthy

Have you ever tried to split sawdust?

— Eugene McCarthy

“No man could be equipped for the presidency if he has never been tempted by one of the seven cardinal sins.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum.”

— Eugene McCarthy

Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts.

— Eugene McCarthy

“We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Vote against anything introduced with a "re" in it, especially reforms, reorganizations, and recodifications. This usually means going back to something that failed once and is likely to do so again.”

— Eugene McCarthy

There are two ways that you can gain territory from another group. One is by conquest. That's essentially the way we took California from Mexico and ... Texas as well. But what's going on now may end up being a kind of recolonization of the Southwest, because the other way you can regain territory is by population infiltration and demographic dominance ... The United States will be faced with the problem that Canada has been faced with ... and which our system is not prepared to accommodate.

— Eugene McCarthy

“There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press ... and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“We don't declare war any more; we declare national defense.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Remember that the worst accidents occur in the middle of the road.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Whatever is morally necessary must be made politically possible.”

— Eugene McCarthy

In politics one may remain aloof and become irrelevant or get involved and get corrupted.

— Eugene McCarthy

“I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really, through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed.”

— Eugene McCarthy

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.

— Eugene McCarthy

You know when I first thought I might have a chance? When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.

— Eugene McCarthy

“War is indefensible on every grounds, military and economic and diplomatic and also on moral.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“I would not want to put him in charge of snake control in Ireland.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“The function of liberal Republicans is to shoot the wounded after battle.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“Broken things are powerful.Things about to break are stronger still.The last shot from the brittle bow is truest.”

— Eugene McCarthy

“If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency,”

— Eugene McCarthy

“The polls show that 10 percent of the public are ready to vote for me even though they don't know I'm running. We hope that figure won't drop when they learn I'm in the race.”

— Eugene McCarthy

If you're in the penaut business you learn to think small.

— Eugene McCarthy

Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.

— Eugene McCarthy

A newspaper may somewhat arrogantly assert that it prints "all the news that's fit to print." But no newspaper yet has been moved to declare at the end of each edition, "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite does.

— Eugene McCarthy

The mortician interviewing the corpses

— Eugene McCarthy

“The difference between Carter and [Ted] Kennedy: Carter has this vague religion which he believes in strongly, while Kennedy has this strong religion which he believes in vaguely.”

— Eugene McCarthy

Anything said three times in Washington becomes a fact.

— Eugene McCarthy