John McCain Quotes

Our country has a long and honorable history. A lost war or any other calamity should not destroy our confidence or weaken our purpose. We were a good nation before Vietnam, and we are a good nation after Vietnam. In all of history, you cannot find a better one. Of that, Ronald Reagan was supremely confident, and he became President to prove it. His was a faith that shouted at tyrants to "tear down this wall." Such faith, such patriotism requires a great deal of love to profess, and I will always revere him for it. When walls were all I had for a world, I learned about a man whose love of freedom gave me hope in a desolate place. His faith honored us, as it honored all Americans, as it honored all freedom-loving people. Let us honor his memory especially today by holding his faith as our own, and let us too tear down walls to freedom. That is what Americans do when they believe in themselves.

The tide of war does not recede just because we wish it to.

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.

The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.

Mr. President, I was pleased to vote today in support of S.J. Res. 22, which would nullify the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized clean water rule. Just yesterday, I voted in support of a bipartisan bill, S. 1140, authored by my colleague, Senator John Barrasso, which would have forced EPA to pull the rule. Unfortunately, that bill did not receive the 60 votes necessary under Senate rules that are needed to pass. The resolution passed by the Senate today is supported by hundreds of national and local organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Homebuilders Association, to name a few. While I understand that the White House has threatened to veto this resolution if it reaches the President's desk, it is still important that a majority of Congress voice their opposition to the EPA rule as Federal courts continue to weigh its legality. Americans around the Nation are lining up against the EPA clean water rule because of its economic cost, the regulatory impact, and the uncertainty it engenders among State and local governments, businesses, and consumer alike. The rule itself bypassed Congress by redefining the types of water bodies under the Clean Water Act that EPA has the authority to regulate. EPA pushed forward without regard for State and local environmental protection laws, which is partly why about a dozen State attorneys general, including from my home State of Arizona, have won injunctions in Federal court against the EPA rule.

My fellow Americans. No association ever mattered more to me. We’re not always right. We’re impetuous and impatient, and rush into things without knowing what we’re really doing. We argue over little differences endlessly, and exaggerate them into lasting breaches. We can be selfish, and quick sometimes to shift the blame for our mistakes to others. But our country ‘tis of thee.‘ What great good we’ve done in the world, so much more good than harm. We served ourselves, of course, but we helped make others free, safe and prosperous because we weren’t threatened by other people’s liberty and success. We need each other. We need friends in the world, and they need us. The bell tolls for us, my friends, Humanity counts on us, and we ought to take measured pride in that. We have not been an island. We were ‘involved in mankind.‘ Before I leave, I’d like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations. I would like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different. We are citizens of a republic made of shared ideals forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it. Whether we think each other right or wrong in our views on the issues of the day, we owe each other our respect, as long as our character merits respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the rancorous debates that enliven and sometimes demean our politics, a mutual devotion to the ideals our nation was conceived to uphold, that all are created equal, and liberty and equal justice are the natural rights of all. Those rights inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be assailed, they can never be wrenched. I want to urge Americans, for as long as I can, to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.

The NDAA incorporates many of the best practices and recent innovations of high-performing private sector health care providers. For example, the NDAA creates specialized care centers of excellence at major medical centers based on the specialized care delivery model in high-performing health systems like the Cleveland Clinic. The legislation also expands the use of telehealth services and incentivizes participation in disease management programs. Finally, the NDAA expands and improves access to care by requiring a standardized appointment system in military treatment facilities and creating more options for patients to get health care in the private sector. Taken together, these reforms, along with many others in the bill, will improve access to and quality of care for servicemembers and their families and retirees and their families, and they will improve the military and combat medical readiness of our force and reduce rising health care costs for the Department of Defense. This entails some difficult decisions. The NDAA makes significant changes to the services' medical command structures and right-sizes the costly military health system infrastructure, and, yes, the NDAA asks some beneficiaries to pay a little more for a better health system.

We prisoners of war came home to a country that had lost a war and the best sense of itself, a country beset by social and economic problems. Assassinations, riots, scandals, contempt for political, religious, and educational institutions gave the appearance that we had become a dysfunctional society. Patriotism was sneered at, the military scorned. The world anticipated the collapse of our global influence. The great, robust, confident Republic that had given its name to the last century seemed exhausted. Ronald Reagan believed differently. He possessed an unshakable faith in America's greatness, past and future, that proved more durable than the prevailing political sentiments of the time. His confidence was a tonic to men who had come home eager to put the war behind us and for the country to do likewise.

I don't give a damn what the President of the United States wants to do or what anybody else wants to do. We will not waterboard; we will not torture... We will not torture people... It doesn't work, my friends. It doesn't work. If you inflict enough pain on somebody long enough, they're going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear to have it stopped... There are accomplished interrogators who can gain the confidence of the suspect and gain all the information that they could possibly want... My God, what does it say about America if we're going to inflict torture on people? It makes it hard for us to make the argument about the moral superiority of our way of our government and our way of life.

The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.

As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it -- along the lines that President Bush proposed.

"Some might read this and say to themselves, "Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?" But it's not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God's children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation that we are."

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

Could I also emphasize that the violence is worse than it has ever been. Mr. President, 22,000 Mexicans have been murdered on the Mexican border. American citizens have been murdered on our border. This is no longer a situation where someone from Mexico or some other country decides they want to cross our borders. These are highly organized, highly sophisticated, well-equipped, well-trained, armed cartels. Drug and human smuggling cartels coordinate with each other through these corridors. They have better communication than our enforcement agencies due to our lack of interoperability. They have sophisticated equipment. They are even sending drugs over using ultralights. This is a struggle for the existence of the Government of Mexico. This is a struggle on our side of the border for the fundamental obligation any government has; that is, to provide its citizens with secure borders. Right now, our citizens are not safe, and therefore the Federal Government should be fulfilling its responsibilities to provide the necessary equipment and manpower to secure our borders. As my colleague from Arizona just pointed out, it can be achieved. It is now a massive failure on the part of the Federal Government. They should also fund it.

Mr. President, as is well known by my colleagues and most Americans, over the last several days, the Governor of Arizona signed legislation, which is controversial, which is designed to affect the issue of illegal immigrants into the country across the Arizona border. That legislation was enacted by the Arizona legislature and signed by the Governor because of the frustration the Governor and the legislation and, indeed, the majority of my constituents have over the Federal Government's failure to carry out its responsibility to secure our border. Many viewed this as a civil rights issue. There is no intention whatsoever to violate anyone's civil rights, but this is a national security issue. This is a national security issue where the United States has an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen, and numbers that stagger those who are unfamiliar with the issue--such as 241,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended on the Tucson sector border of Arizona in the last year. Do the math. You have three to five times that number who actually cross, so we are talking about a million people crossing the border illegally.