John McCain > Quotes

“In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her. ”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.”
― John McCain

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”
― John McCain, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember

“We have made mistakes. We haven’t always used our power wisely. We have abused it sometimes and we’ve been arrogant. But, as often as not, we recognized those wrongs, debated them openly, and tried to do better. And the good we have done for humanity surpasses the damage caused by our errors. We have sought to make the world more stable and secure, not just our own society. We have advanced norms and rules of international relations that have benefited all. We have stood up to tyrants for mistreating their people even when they didn’t threaten us, not always, but often. We don’t steal other people’s wealth. We don’t take their land. We don’t build walls to freedom and opportunity. We tear them down. To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic. American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. Those attachments belong with other tired dogmas that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***!”
― John McCain

“Americans Never Quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We Make History.
-John McCain”
― John McCain

“What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner's shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike's flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us.
"The guards discovered Mike's flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike's they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and begun sewing a new flag.”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“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”
― John McCain

“I'm not President Bush”
― John McCain

“It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.”
― John McCain, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember

“Ironically for someone who had so long asserted his own individuality as his first and best defense against insults of any kind, I discovered that faith in myself proved to be the least formidable strength I possessed when confronting alone organized inhumanity on a greater scale than I had conceived possible. Faith in myself was important, and remains important to my self esteem. But I discovered in prison that faith in myself alone, sep0arate from other, more important allegiances , was ultimately no match for the cruelty that human beings could devise when they were entirely unencumbered by respect for the God given dignity of man. This is the lesson I learned in prison. It is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have ever learned.”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“Ronald Wilson Reagan: America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added, “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“No matter what job you get,' he told my mother, 'you can make a good one out of it”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears.”
― John McCain

“What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It’s up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“... General Petraeus recognized the sacrifice made by two soldiers who had planned to become naturalized citizens at the ceremony, and were now represented by two pairs of boots on two chairs, having been killed in action two days before. "They died serving a country that was not yet theirs," Petraeus observed... I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country's resources or a threat to our "culture" could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations

“But we’re at a place in our political history when passing legislation through the House with bipartisan support is considered by some folks a greater evil than the problem it’s intended to solve.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“influences. I took from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that defending the dignity of others is never a lost cause whether you succeed or not. And I thrill to the exhortation in the poem that inspired the novel, to be “part of the main,” to be “involved in mankind.” It’s who we are. The right to life and liberty, to be governed by consent and ruled by laws, to have equal justice and protection of property, these values are the core of our national identity. And it is fidelity to them—not ethnicity or religion, culture or class—that makes one an American. To accept the abolition or abridgement of those rights in other societies should be no less false to Americans than their abridgment in our own society. Human rights are not our invention. They don’t represent standards from which particular cultures or religions can be exempted. They are universal. They exist above the state and beyond history. They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. That’s our creed. The authors put it right at the beginning of the manifesto they wrote to declare our independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“Country First”
― John McCain

“I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.

Where's that?

Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there.”
― John McCain

“In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.
"I loved what I missed most from my life at home: my family and friends; the sights and sounds of my own country; the hustle and purposefulness of Americans; their fervid independence; sports; music; information--all the attractive qualities of American life. But though I longed for the things at home I cherished the most, I still shared the ideals of America. And since those ideals were all that I possessed of my country, they became all the more important to me.”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“Demographics aren’t destiny. Our culture isn’t the work of one race or religion. To suggest otherwise is to contradict our ideals and to doubt their power.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“But, as Winston Churchill observed, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“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.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations

“No just cause is futile, even if it’s lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.”
― John McCain

“Typically, he found some value in his troublemaking and in the punishment he earned for it. "You get to know people that you don't ordinarily know if you're one of the good boys. And sometimes the world's not always made up of all the good boys either, not by a long shot," he said.”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“Our character is a lifelong project, and perhaps the older we are, and the more fixed our shortcomings are, the more we can use inspiration to encourage our escape from the restraints of our deficiencies. The”
― John McCain, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember