Eugene McCarthy

Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy (29 March 1916 – 10 December 2005) American politician from the U.S. state of Minnesota, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives (1949 - 1959) and the U.S. Senate from (1959 - 1971) and playing a major role in the 1968 presidential election, unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic nomination on an anti-Vietnam War platform.

Sourced

• Have you ever tried to split sawdust?
  • Response to accusations that he had split the US Democratic Party by campaigning for president. NBC TV (23 October 1969)

• 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.
  • Chicago Tribune (10 September 1978)

• The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
  • Time magazine (12 February 1979)

• There is only one thing to do — take it to the country!
  • On opposing the war in Vietnam, as quoted in The New York Times (11 December 2005)

• We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it.
  • The New York Times (11 December 2005)

• I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really, through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed.
  • The New York Times (11 December 2005)

Poems

Selected poems online

• The maple tree that night
  Without a wind or rain
  Let go its leaves
  Because its time had come.
  • "The Maple Tree"

• Now it is certain.
  There is no magic stone.
  No secret to be found.
  One must go
  With the mind's winnowed learning.
  • "Courage After Sixty"

• 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.
  • "Courage After Sixty"

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

• I have left Act I, for involution
  And Act II. There, mired in complexity
  I cannot write Act III.
• "Lament for an Aging Politician"

Attributed

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

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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