John Sidney McCain III Quotes

You cannot tell the enemy you’re going to leave and expect the enemy to not – and expect to succeed. I mean, that’s just a fundamental of warfare.

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.

We know that Medicare’s going broke in seven years, but we need to start over.That’s what the American people want us to do.

We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves, from ourselves.

The way you have bipartisan negotiations, you sit down across the table, as we did with Ted Kennedy, as I’ve done with many other members, and you say, ‘OK, here’s what I want, here’s what you want. We’ll adhere to your principles, but we’ll make concessions.’

The tea partiers are a great addition. The tea partiers have invigorated a base that has been dormant for a long period of time. We’re going to have a broad array of different views in our Republican conference, and I think it might be more interesting than any I’ve been in in a long time.

The problem… is that most members of Congress don’t pay attention to what’s going on.

The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I’m going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

The core political values of our free society are so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that only a few malcontents, lunatics generally, ever dare to threaten them.

The American people want us to stop spending. And so let’s just give them some certainty. Let’s extend the tax – the existing tax cuts. And then let’s give some more tax breaks to small businesses and large. And then maybe the American people will have some confidence.

Thank God for our form of government. The media won’t let there be any cover-up.

Remember the words of Chairman Mao: ‘It’s always darkest before it’s totally black.’.

Our political differences, now matter how sharply they are debated, are really quite narrow in comparison to the remarkably durable national consensus on our founding convictions.

Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq, a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice.

Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.

On the subject of Osama bin Laden… we will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell.

On ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ I was always the same. I said we needed a complete review of the impact on morale and battle effectiveness of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ before we repeal it. That’s my position now. Now they’re trying to ram through a repeal without a – any kind of really realistic survey done.

My greatest fear is the Iranians acquire a nuclear weapon and give it to a terrorist organization. And there is a real threat of them doing that.