"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."
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Quote collection
Eugene McCarthy quotes (page 2 of 2)
38 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative."
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"The function of liberal Republicans is to shoot the wounded after battle."
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"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."
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"I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really, through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed."
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"The mortician interviewing the corpses"
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"Have you ever tried to split sawdust?"
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"In politics one may remain aloof and become irrelevant or get involved and get corrupted."
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"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."
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"Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember."
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"I would not want to put him in charge of snake control in Ireland."
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"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."
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"There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics."
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"If you're in the penaut business you learn to think small."
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"I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel."
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"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."
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"If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency."
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