Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

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.

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.

If we must disagree, let's disagree without being disagreeable.

It is the excitement of becoming - always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again- but always trying and always gaining

I believe that the country weekly acts as a form of social cement in holding the community together.

I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for.

I'd rather give my life than be afraid to give it.

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

An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology-we know now-carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use.

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

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

I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad: that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength; our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.

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.

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.

We live amid falling taboos. In our crowded little hour of history we have seen how the prejudice of religion no longer can bar the way to the White House. Some of you may live to see the day when the prejudice of sex no longer places the Presidency beyond the reach of a greatly gifted American lady. Long before them, I hope you will see a woman member of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress and in our State Legislatures we need more women to bring their sensitive experience to the shaping of our decisions.

But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

Just like the Alamo, somebody damn well needed to go to their aid. Well, by God, I'm going to Viet Nam's aid!

All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

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

Liberty is not enough.

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.

Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.

Our partnership has been built on four pillars The first pillar is peace. The second pillar is freedom. The third pillar is respect. The fourth pillar is cooperation.

I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women.

I won't have you electioneering on my doorstep. Every time you get in trouble in Parliament you run over here with your shirttail hanging out.

To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.

You've got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you've got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

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.

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'

The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

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.

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

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

Of those to whom much is given, much is asked.

The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well.

I will not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

If the American people don't love me, their descendants will.

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

Every citizen, regardless of his race, creed, or color, is entitled to equal justice.

The family is the corner stone of our society.

As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too - a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people - so that those who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.

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

Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don't want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.

Nothing is more despicable than the old age of a passionate man. When the vigour of youth fails him, and his amusements pall with frequent repetition, his occasional rage sinks by decay of strength into peevishness; that peevishness, for want of novelty and variety, becomes habitual; the world falls off from around him, and he is left, as Homer expresses it, to devour his own heart in solitude and contempt.

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.

A President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.