Eugene McCarthy Quotes

17 Sourced 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 inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Eugene McCarthy
There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

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

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
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
The glove has been thrown to the ground,
The last choice of weapons made.
A book for one thought.
A poem for one line.
A line for one word.

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

Eugene McCarthy
Now it is certain.
There is no magic stone.
No secret to be found.
One must go
With the mind's winnowed learning.

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
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 have left Act I, for involution
And Act II. There, mired in complexity
I cannot write Act III.

Eugene McCarthy
The maple tree that night
Without a wind or rain
Let go its leaves
Because its time had come.

Eugene McCarthy
The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. 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
There is only one thing to do — take it to the country!

Eugene McCarthy