Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

A President Roosevelt comes only once in a century. I believe God knew and does know of the need of the world at this moment. I don't believe President Roosevelt is an accident in time, or that it is an accident that he is President for a third time. I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt truly is the voice of liberty in the world.

In the years since then, those four freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear - have stood as a summary of our aspirations for the American Republic and for the world.

I don't have any handicap. I am all handicap.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.

If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness ... if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other ... then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

If you're not listening, you're not learning.

All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.

'Human history, ' H.G. Wells once wrote, 'becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.' You and I cannot be indifferent to the outcome of that race. We care deeply about the winner. Because we do care so deeply about the winner, that is why we are all in the East Room of the White House today.

Voting is the first duty of democracy.

When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.

We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities ... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.

We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding, in and close to our cities. In the backcountry we need to copy the great Appalachian Trail in all parts of America.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

I cannot say and no man could say that no more will be asked of us.

So here is the Great Society. It's the time - and it's going to be soon - when nobody in this country is poor.

No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

The Organization of American States couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.

There is no excuse-and we should call a spade a spade-for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic waste. There is no excuse for communities to use other people's rivers as a dump for their raw sewage.

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.

Republicans simply don't know how to manage the economy.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.

Second, this law has become a special symbol of our Nation's most important purpose: to fulfill the individual - his freedom, his happiness, his promise.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will.

Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

Such is the condition of life that something is always wanting to happiness. In youth we have warm hopes, which are soon blasted by rashness and negligence, and great designs which are defeated by inexperience. In age, we have knowledge and prudence, without spirit to exert, or motives to prompt them; we are able to plan schemes, and regulate measures, but have not time remaining to bring them to completion.

I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.

In a nation of millions and a world of billions, the individual is still the first and basic agent of change.

Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.

Throughout my entire public career I have followed the personal philosophy that I am a free man, an American, a public servant, and a member of my party, in that order always and only.

He's got great vision. If he can get outside, he can take it all the way. That's what we were worried about.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize Oh man ... I could be eating a slow learner.

We need to remember that the separation of church and state must never mean the separation of religious values from the lives of public servants ... If we who serve free men today are to differ from the tyrants of this age, we must balance the powers in our hands with God in our hearts.

If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

The presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger than he was; and no matter how big, not big enough for its demands.

For the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace - for it is education that places reason over force.

The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman-and each nation-must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.

I am making a collection of the things my opponents have found me to be and, when this election is over, I am going to open a museum and put them on display.

You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying you are free to compete with all the others, and still justly believe you have been completely fair ... We seek not just freedom but opportunity ... not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.

As long as you are black, and you're gonna be black till the day you die, no one's gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you'll make it. Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture.[To hi chauffer Robert Parker, when Parker said he'd prefer to be referred to by his name rather than "boy," "nigger" or "chief."]

I am afraid, ... that health begins, after seventy, and often long before, to have a meaning different from that which it had at thirty. But it is culpable to murmur at the established order of the creation, as it is vain to oppose it. He that lives, must grow old; and he that would rather grow old than die, has God to thank for the infirmities of old age.

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.

History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education ... I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.

All that Hubert needs over there is a gal to answer the phone and a pencil with an eraser on it.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

Let no one ever think for a moment that national debate means national division.

He wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

New laboratories and centers will help our schools lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and deserve special treatment.

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us - dollars and all.

Not merely a nation but a nation of nations.

One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.

How incredible it is that in this fragile existence we should hate and destroy one another. There are possibilities enough for all who will abandon mastery over others to pursue mastery over nature. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way.

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition ... well, they are still radical ideas.

You have your own difficulties. We watch, with friendly confidence in your capacity to merge differences in the grand dream of Canadian design.

I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. [Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special Counsel Harry McPherson.]

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

Hug your friends tight, but your enemies tighter ? hug ?em so tight they can?t wiggle.

Come now. let us reason together.

There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.

For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty.

[E]very man, everywhere, should be free to develop his talents to their full potential - unhampered by arbitrary barriers of race or birth or income.

Conservation is ethically sound. It is rooted in our love of the land, our respect for the rights of others, our devotion to the rule of law.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.

The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.

I may not worry as much as Prime Minister Eshkol does about Israel, but I worry as deeply.

To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.

Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!"
In 1966 upon being told that President Charles DeGaulle had taken France out of NATO and that all U.S. troops must be evacuated off of French soil President Lyndon Johnson mentioned to Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he should ask DeGaulle about the Americans buried in France. Dean implied in his answer that that DeGaulle should not really be asked that in the meeting at which point President Johnson then told Secretary of State Dean Rusk:
"Ask him about the cemeteries Dean!"
That made it into a Presidential Order so he had to ask President DeGaulle.
So at end of the meeting Dean did ask DeGaulle if his order to remove all U.S. troops from French soil also included the 60,000+ soldiers buried in France from World War I and World War II.
DeGaulle, embarrassed, got up and left and never answered.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1965

My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone, but ours together. We are one nation and one people. Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen, but upon all citizens.

This is the majesty and the meaning of this moment.

For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own.

Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves m a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change-- rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and uprooting old ways.

Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged character of our people, and on their faith.

THE AMERICAN COVENANT

They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-- to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.

JUSTICE AND CHANGE

Firs

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own. [ ... ] Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged
character of our people, and on their faith.

Peace does not come just because we wish for it. Peace must be fought for. It must be built stone by stone.

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

Mr. Speaker, at a time when the nation is again confronted with necessity for calling its young men into service in the interestsof National Security, I cannot see the wisdom of denying our young women the opportunity to serve their country.

Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven't given up trying.

Today - wealthier, more powerful and more able than ever before in our history - our Nation can declare another essential freedom.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources
because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

We must change to master change.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials. Motor vehicles and home heating plants, municipal dumps and factories continually hurl pollutants into the air we breathe. Each day almost 50,000 tons of unpleasant, and sometimes poisonous, sulfur dioxide are added to the atmosphere, and our automobiles produce almost 300,000 tons of other pollutants.

The debris of civilization litters the landscapes and spoils the beaches. Conservation's concerns now is not only for man's enjoyment-but for man's survival.

Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

The crotch, down where your nuts hang, is always a little too tight.

For it was only after I could become President of this country that I could really see in all its hopeful and troubling implications just how much the hopes of our citizens and the security of our Nation and the real strength of our democracy depended upon the learning and the understanding of our people.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

Every man of any education would rather be called a rascal, than accused of deficiency in the graces.