Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

In our home there was always prayer - aloud, proud and unapologetic.

In my state, on the basis of the separate but equal doctrine, we have made enormous strides over the years in the education of both races. Personally, I think it would have been sounder judgment to allow that progress to continue through the process of natural evolution. However, there is no point crying about spilt milk.

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

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

No nation in the world has had greater fortune than mine in sharing a continent with the people and the nation of Canada.

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

If we fail now, then we will have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith; freedom asks more than it gives; and the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.

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

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.

For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.

It is very seldom that any one is in prison for an ordinary crime unless early in life he entered a path that almost invariably led to the prison gate. Most of the inmates are the children of the poor. In many instances they are either orphans or half-orphans; their homes were the streets and byways of big cities, and their paths naturally and inevitably took them to their final fate.

If there is one word that describes our form of society in America, it may be the word-voluntary.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time.... He's a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.

Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their own imagination, which sometimes puts sceptres in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. 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.

Our understanding of how to live with one another is still far behind our knowledge of how to destroy one another.

Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different,' in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.

Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right.

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.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

Today our problem is not making miracles, but managing them.

You know there is no one in the world I would rather sleep with than Yuki.

[The United States and Israel] share many common objectives ... chief of which is the building of a better world in which every nation can develop its resources and develop them in freedom and peace.

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

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

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

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.

I wake up 5 a.m. some mornings and hear the planes coming in at National Airport and I think they are bombing me.

A President must call on many persons--some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it--to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.

I'm willin' for any solution - religious, political. I'm not going to keep offerin' to negotiate so much because they turn us down each time. It indicates a weakness on our part.

Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that's the challenge.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.

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

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

Never make a speech at a country dance or a football game.

You aren't learning anything when you're talking.

He's a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.

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.

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject itself, or know where to find it.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.

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.

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.

There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.