Harry Truman Quotes

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't. ~ Michael Ignatieff

It is important to the peace of the world to understand each other and have full faith in each other's sincerity. That is all we ask; that is all we want[ ... ] ~ Harry Truman

We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. ~ Harry Truman

Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged. ~ Harry Truman

Mama and Papa are more to blame (for delinquency) than the kids; parents should stay home and raise their children and spend less time in taverns. ~ Harry Truman

The union of our arms in ~ Harry Truman

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950] ~ Harry Truman

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself. ~ Harry Truman

Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations ... He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions. ~ David McCullough

I come to the office each morning and stay for long hours doing what has to be done to the best of my ability. And when you've done the best you can, you can't do any better. ~ Harry Truman

Poor Ike. He'll say do this and do that and nothing at all will happen. ~ Harry Truman

You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live ~ Harry Truman

We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are. ~ Harry Truman

The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it. Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they'll believe it and go along with you. ~ Harry Truman

large numbers of reporters and ~ Harry Truman

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in. ~ Harry Truman

The bulk of the uranium available to ~ Harry Truman

I'll come back to George Washington just long enough to say goodbye to him. He was a great man and a good man, and when his work was over as our great first president, he went back home to Virginia for his long-earned rest. Just three years later, on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he went to his final rest. As ~ Harry Truman

Some smart alecs of those days after World War I used to say: The French fought for liberty, the British fought to control the seas, but the Americans fought for souvenirs. ~ Harry Truman

All of you, I am sure, have heard many cries about Government interference with business and about "creeping socialism." I should like to remind the gentlemen who make these complaints that if events had been allowed to continue as they were going prior to March 4, 1933, most of them would have no businesses left for the Government or for anyone else to interfere with - and almost surely we would have socialism in this country, real socialism. ~ Harry Truman

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. ~ Harry Truman

Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, riches take wings, those who cheer today may curse tomorrow and only one thing endures - character. ~ Harry Truman

We now have a lack of readiness that is quite scary. We have planes that were - that Harry Truman inaugurated, the B-52. We have - the Navy has been gutted and decimated. The readiness of the Marines is way down. ~ Jeb Bush

Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home
but not for housing. They are strong for labor
but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights. They favor minimum wage
the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all
but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine
for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing
but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing
so long as it doesn't spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it. ~ Harry Truman

Harry Truman once said, 'There are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of the other people - the 150 or 160 million - is the responsibility of the president of the United States, and I propose to fulfill it.' ~ John F. Kennedy

There's nothing better than cake but more cake. ~ Harry Truman

Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule. ~ Rick Perlstein

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own. ~ Harry Truman

Barack Obama is not Harry Truman, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan to stop World War II. Barack Obama is not John F. Kennedy, who lowered marginal tax rates to get economic growth and job creation. Barack Obama and the far left, they are a completely different ball of wax. ~ Monica Crowley

Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man. ~ Harry Truman

We have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare - ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. ~ Harry Truman

I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was. ~ Harry Truman

Men often mistake notoriety for fame, and would rather be noticed for their vices than not be noticed at all. ~ Harry Truman

I don't believe in anti-anything. A man has to have a program; you have to be for something, otherwise you will never get anywhere. ~ Harry Truman

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy - that's what the Democratic party ought to reach for. ~ Theodore C. Sorensen

There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn't. ~ Robert Dallek

Actions are the seeds of fate. Deeds grow into destiny. ~ Harry Truman

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. ~ Harry Truman

In most of my campaigns, I find it is best not to mention my opponent by name because, by doing so, it just gives him a chance to get into the headlines. ~ Harry Truman

I shall continue to do what I think is right, whether anybody likes it or not. ~ Harry Truman

Harry Truman once said: "Find me a one-armed economist, because every one I know always says, 'Well, on the other hand . . . ~ Ronald Reagan

Harry Truman, who was a Bible-believing Christian Zionist, defied the secretary of state he so admired, George C. Marshall, and won a place in Israel's history by recognizing the new state 11 minutes after it declared its independence in 1948. ~ Elliott Abrams

Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. ~ Harry Truman

Once a decision was made, I didn't worry about it afterward ... ~ Harry Truman

Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state. ~ Harry Truman

Politics should make a thief, a roué, and a pessimist of anyone but I don't believe I am any of them... ~ Harry Truman

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that "people want to go back to Mayberry", the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.)

Maybe it's also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon.

But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn't thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better.

For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing).

And these days, as I pass Trump sign after ~ Thomas Frank

The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive "inside" books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so. For ~ David McCullough

[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat. ~ Harry Truman

If you can't dance then you are a loser. ~ Harry Truman

Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook. ~ Harry Truman

I won't sell influence and I'm perfectly willing to be cussed if I'm right. ~ Harry Truman

The only thing that's really new is the history you don't know. ~ Harry Truman

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. ~ Harry Truman

We should resolve now that the health of this nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all it's citizens deserves the help of all the nation. ~ Harry Truman

If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. ~ Jeff Greenfield

I'm just a politician from Missouri and proud of it. ~ Harry Truman

Within the first few months I discovered that being President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed. ~ Harry Truman

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo. ~ Harry Truman

He was a windbag. He made a great many orations, and I imagine he did a very good job, but he was still a windbag ~ Harry Truman

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities.

Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia!

But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged - not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country.

There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budg ~ Bayard Rustin

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants. ~ Harry Truman

Everyone is against Harry (Truman) except the people. ~ Clark Griffith

Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, others, knew how to lead. They knew how to ask the American people for the right things. ~ John F. Kerry

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles. ~ Harry Truman

him up, of course. I don't know whether they ~ Harry Truman

On the one hand, the Republicans are telling industrial workers that the high cost of food in the cities is due to this government's farm policy. On the other hand, the Republicans are telling the farmers that the high cost of manufactured goods on the farm is due to this government's labor policy.
That's plain hokum. It's an old political trick: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em." But this time it won't work. ~ Harry Truman

Yet Barkley drew back. Perhaps he, like Harry Truman, knew that the quiet power of incumbency easily overcomes the noise of crowds and bands. ~ David Pietrusza

The 'C' students run the world. ~ Harry Truman

He loved politics in large part exactly because it meant time spent with men like Cactus Jack Garner(who would be remembered for observing that the vice presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss). ~ David McCullough

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt? ~ Harry Truman

The most peaceful thing in the world is plowing a field. Chances are you'll do your best thinking that way. And that's why I've always thought and said, farmers are the smartest people in the world, they don't go for high hats and they can spot a phony a mile off. ~ Harry Truman

People who run for office and are defeated aren't rejected in the usual sense of the word. They're just defeated because they couldn't get enough votes that one time. It doesn't mean the public despises them. It's a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that's all. The examples I've given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln's cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don't become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don't have any trouble. ~ Harry Truman

You can't have anything worthwhile without difficulties. ~ Harry Truman

Tact is the ability to step on a man's toes without messing up the shine on his shoes. ~ Harry Truman

The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know. ~ Harry Truman

Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one, but after it's over, it isn't so bad. ~ Harry Truman

Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Nobody wants to hear that you met Harry Truman ... I met Harry Truman ... But you know what I mean? Nobody's interested. They want to know you met Rihanna. And that kills me. ~ Joan Rivers

A person who is fundamentally honest doesn't need a code of ethics. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are all the ethical code anybody needs. ~ Harry Truman

Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel. ~ Dick Durbin

I fear we are too much concerned with material things to remember that our real strength lies in spiritual values. ~ Harry Truman

Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers. ~ Harry Truman

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection. ~ Harry Truman

Believe and you're halfway there. ~ Harry Truman

Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable ~ Harry Truman

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. ~ Harry Truman

I doubt if there is any problem in the world today - social, political or economic - that would not find a happy solution if approached in the spirit of the sermon on the mount. ~ Harry Truman

I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt. ~ Gore Vidal

Hungry Jack's real name was Charles R. Hoofard.
He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.
In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.
Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.
In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.
History is full of shit like that. ~ Andrew Smith

I loved Harry Truman with all my heart and soul. ~ Willard Scott

MacArthur's worse than the Cabots & the Lodges-they at least talked to one another before they told God what to do. ~ Harry Truman

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. ~ Harry Truman

We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others ~ Harry Truman

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell. ~ Harry Truman

My definition of a leader in a free country is a man who can persuade people to do what they don't want to do, or do what they're too lazy to do, and like it. ~ Harry Truman

You want a friend in this city? [Washington, DC.] Get a dog! ~ Harry Truman

I'm very proud of what Harry Truman turned out to be in office and the record he made. Certainly I think he'll go down in history as one of the greats, because of his conscience, his determination to stick with what he knew was right. ~ Walter Cronkite

The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not to dominate the world. ~ Harry Truman