50 Quotes by Eugene McCarthy

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

The mortician interviewing the corpses

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Have you ever tried to split sawdust?