John McCain Quotes

Let me just say again, We have drawn down. Three of the five brigades are home. The Marines, the additional Marines are home. By the end of July, they will have been back.

In America, we have always believed that if the day was a disappointment, we would win tomorrow. That’s what John Lewis believed when he marched across this bridge.

Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success [in Iraq] will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women. And that's a great tragedy.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice, and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my country's.

I’m sure there are legions of committed national security officials working hard to figure out how to combat his cyberattacks, his disinformation campaigns, and his possible, even likely, effort to hack into our voting machines. But President Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what Putin is doing to just not caring about it. Just last November he appeared to take Putin’s denials at face value. “There’s nothing ‘America First,’ ” I pointed out, “about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community.” And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States. Unless the elected leaders of our government provide persistent direction and leadership and resources to officials working to defend our democracy, we won’t stop Putin’s next assault. With a nominal investment of resources, and a bold disregard for our resistance, Putin’s interference in our last election achieved all his objectives. He damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but that wasn’t his most important priority. Encouraging our government’s dysfunction, and disaffection and distrust in the polity were his main objectives. He sees evidence of his success every day in our polarization and gridlock.

But, as Winston Churchill observed, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

You may have noticed that Senator Obama's supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about western Pennsylvania lately. And you know, I couldn't agree with them more.

I know how to secure the peace.

I say to my colleagues: This is an ambitious piece of legislation, and it is one that reflects the growing threats to our Nation. Everything about the NDAA is threat driven--everything, that is, but its top line of $602 billion. That is an arbitrary figure set by last year's budget agreement, having nothing to do with events in the world, and which itself was a product of 5 years of letting politics, not strategy, determine the level of funding for our national defense. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs GEN Martin Dempsey described last year's defense budget as "the lower ragged edge of manageable risks." Yet here we are 1 year later with defense spending arbitrarily capped at $17 billion below what our military needed and planned for last year. I don't know what lies beneath the lower ragged edge of manageable, but this is what I fear it means--that our military is becoming less and less able to deter conflict and that if, God forbid, deterrence does fail somewhere and we end up in conflict, our Nation will deploy young Americans into battle without sufficient training or equipment to fight a war that will take longer, be larger, cost more, and ultimately claim more American lives than it otherwise would have. That is the growing risk we face, and for the sake of the men and women serving in our military, we cannot change course soon enough. The Senate will have the opportunity to do just that when we consider my amendment to reverse the budget-driven cuts to the capabilities of our Armed Forces that are needed to defend the Nation. I hope we will seize this opportunity. We ask a lot of our men and women in uniform, and they never let us down. We must not let them down. As we move forward with consideration of the NDAA, I stand ready to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass this important legislation and give our military the resources they need and deserve.

I don’t know if I would want him as vice president. He and I have the same strengths. But to serve in other capacities? Hell, yeah.

Here is a small idea: Why don't we see what the school lunch program is in our local schools? Why don't we see what the physical education requirements are in our local school districts? Why don't parents do that? I was appalled, and I am sure my colleagues and all Americans were, to see recently there is one State in America where one-third of the population suffers from obesity. We know what obesity does to health care costs, not to mention the lives of individuals. Why don't we also look at what has been tried and done before: an outcome treatment of patients. A patient has diabetes. You pay that provider for 6 months or a year or 2 years and say: OK, here is the amount of money, and if you keep that patient well, you will receive a reward at the end of that treatment period, rather than to pay for every single test and procedure.

Maybe 100. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

The Senator and I have been to Walter Reed and many other places like that and have seen our wounded. Wounded by what? By IEDs, the copper-tipped IEDs that Soleimani made sure came into Iraq, that would penetrate armor and wreak havoc and wounded so many and killed so many young Americans. It is now Soleimani who is visibly leading the fight in Tikrit. Strangely enough, our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saw so many flags--guess what--with the banners of the Iranian-backed Shia militias. I would ask my friend, isn't this in some ways a Greek tragedy? Isn't this in some ways a situation where we sacrifice so much? And thanks to the inspired, fantastic leadership of General Petraeus and Colonel McFarland and all of those individuals who fought so well and led so well, we had it won, it was stabilized. And now because of the President's decision not to leave a residual force, we are seeing capitals in the Middle East--whether it be Sana'a, Baghdad, Beirut, or Damascus--we are now seeing an overwhelming Iranian presence that is dedicated, among other things, to the extinction of the State of Israel.

We do not often hear anymore about Members of Congress who distinguish themselves by having the courage of their convictions; who risk their personal interests for what they believe is in the public interest. I have seen many examples of it here, but the cynicism of our times, among the political class and the media and the voters, tends to miss examples of political courage or dismiss them as probable frauds or, at best, exceptions that prove the rule. In his time in the Senate, Russ Feingold, every day and in every way, had the courage of his convictions. And though I am quite a few years older than Russ, and have served in this body longer than he has, I confess I have always felt he was my superior in that cardinal virtue. We were both up for re-election in 1998. I had an easy race. Russ had a difficult one. As many of our colleagues will remember, Russ and I opposed soft money, the unlimited corporate and labor donations to political parties that we believed were compromising the integrity of Congress, and we were a nuisance on the subject. Russ 's opponent in 1998 was outspending him on television, and the race became tighter. It reached a point where most observers, Democrats and Republicans, expected him to lose. The Democratic Party pleaded with Russ to let it spend soft money on his behalf. Russ refused. He risked his seat, the job he loved, because his convictions were more important to him than any personal success. I think he is one of the most admirable people I have ever met in my life.

I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a 'K', a 'G', and a 'B'.