John McCain Quotes

Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility

I campaigned in 2012 all over this country for months: 'Repeal and replace Obamacare.' That was not the mandate of the voters. If they wanted to repeal Obamacare, the 2012 election would have been probably significantly different.

Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people. Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded.

War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

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.

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

Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you in return.

We should be I hope finally realizing what Vladimir Putin is.

He's an old colonel, KGB, apparatchik, and he dreams of the restoration of the Russian empire.

I admire Obama, and I like him. I think he has a great deal of talent. He should be applauded for his eloquence and for his ability to motivate millions.

There's two ways of working in Washington, .

.. One is to go along and get along. The other is to stand up for what you believe in.

I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing.

Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace and it's got to be fixed.

As long as there is a war on terrorism going on, we're all going to have to work together.

You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.

I think conventional wisdom is that time is not on our side.

But there are a number of members of Congress who have primaries and when those primaries are done, they may be more inclined to address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform.

The political tactics of division and slander are not our values.

They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.

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

We have a lot of work to do and I‘m afraid that it‘s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.

And by the way, I would not only reappoint Greenspan;

if Greenspan would happen to die, God forbid, I would do like they did in the movie 'Weekend at Bernie's.' I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.

The abuse of prisoners hurts America's cause in the war on terror, endangers US service members who might be captured by the enemy, and is anathema to the values Americans have held dear for generations.

What if there's another terrorist attack? I cringe at the ideas of our enemies watching this, knowing much like the president we have now. You can do anything you want, you can jerk us around, you can harass our naval ships the way Iran is doing right now, and we're not going to do anything. We're not going to react.

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

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.

I don't think it's bribery; I think it's extortion. Bribery, you know, is when the person that's giving the money does it voluntarily. What it is in Washington is extortion because they all ask for the money.

Men and women serving in the military deserve better than what they're giving - what we're giving them. They don't know what they're going to be doing tomorrow.

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.

A man I admire and respect - Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.

I think where [Donald Trump] loses most hawkish republicans is when he talking about how much he likes [Vladimir] Putin. That should make any person who believe in the American exceptionalism, incredibly uncomfortable.

But please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.

I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

When you have airplanes with precision weapons, striking hospitals in Aleppo and slaughtering innocent men, women and children, you're committing a war crime. So we need more sanctions against Russia. We should not relax them.

Barbara Boxer is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I've had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her.

I spent several years in a north Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?

I respect Sarah Palin. I appreciate her and her husband enormously. I think she will continue to play a major role in the future of the Republican Party.

I think that when you look at the great politicians, the two greatest in my view were George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, they certainly had character traits. You also know Abraham Lincoln overcame severe depression problems that he had when he was younger, which gave him the strength and the character later on.

I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia.

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.

It's the only way that I see that it can be done," McCain said.

"Obviously, it has failed in the past, but I also notice there is a somewhat changed attitude on the part of the American people about this issue.

Today more people lose their seats in the Politburo in Havana than in the Congress of America, ... We need to have competitive races for the Legislature. ... We have to have a clash of ideas.

Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.

The day that I can land at the airport in Baghdad and ride in an unarmed car down the highway to the Green Zone is the day that I'll start considering withdrawals from Iraq.

What I don't know is what the unexpected might be.

I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell.

How much damage will have been done before we act?

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.

Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why you don't fix that?

That's give [Donald Trump] so much attention. And it's so funny. There actually have conflicting opinions on women in combat, in the military. So they have all the issues that stake. I'm more concerned with the VA than anything else.

Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it's a job for the department of defense.

Bashar Assad is a major cause of the refugees which are now flooding Europe and causing such consternation in the United States.