Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

Nothing so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth....Americans are stimulated by the big job; the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

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

It now seems to be quite a thing to pull down the mighty from their seats and roll them in the mire. This practice deserves pronounced condemnation. Hero worship is a tremendous force in uplifting and strengthening. Humanity, let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great.

As the House is designed to provide a reflection of the mood of the moment, the Senate is meant to reflect the continuity of the past--to preserve the delicate balance of justice between the majority's whims and the minority's rights.

This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.

When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

It will be controlled when the people of America, through their elected representatives, demand the right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear..

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

John ain't been worth a damn since he started wearing $300 suits.

It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anybody has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed.

You know when you're milking a cow and you have all that foamy white milk in the bucket and you're just about through, when all of a sudden the cow switches her tail through a pile of manure and slaps it into that foamy white milk. That's Bill Fulbright.

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

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.

It (the heart) is supposed in popular language, to be the seat sometimes, of courage, sometimes of affection, sometimes of honesty, or baseness.

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

...that though they may refuse to grow wise, they must inevitably grow old; ...that the proper solaces of age are not music and compliments, but wisdom and devotion; that those who are so unwilling to quit the world will soon be driven from it; and that it is therefore in their interest to retire while there yet remain a few hours of nobler employments.

I am a compromiser and maneuverer. I try to get something. That's the way our system works.

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

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.

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.

I'm gonna hunker down like a jack rabbit in a dust storm

No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

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.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

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

Every gift contains a danger. Whatever gift we have we are compelled to express. And if the expression of that gift is blocked, distorted, or merely allowed to languish, then the gift turns against us, and we suffer.

Law is the great civilizing machinery. It liberates the desire to build and subdues the desire to destroy.

True poverty does not come from God.

Any man who's not willing to take half a loaf in a negotiation, well, that man never went to bed hungry.

The Secretary of Labor is in charge of finding you a job, the Secretary of the Treasury is in charge of taking half the money you make away from you, and the Attorney General is in charge of suing you for the other half.

So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest we form projects which we delay to execute, indulge such expectations as nothing but along train of events can gratify, and suffer those passions to gain upon us which are only excusable in the prime of life.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

It is important that the United States remain a two-party system. I'm a fellow who likes small parties and the Republican Party can't be too small to suit me.

Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

An unspoiled river is a very rare thing in this Nation today. Their flow and vitality have been harnessed by dams and too often they have been turned into open sewers by communities and by industries. It makes us all very fearful that all rivers will go this way unless somebody acts now to try to balance our river development.

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

The United States stands by its friends. Israel is one of its friends Peace can be based only on agreement between the parties and agreement can be achieved only through negotiations between them. The United States will not impose the terms of peace. The United States is prepared to supply military equipment necessary to support the efforts of friendly governments, like Israel's, to defend the safety of their people.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

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

I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.