Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes (110 Quotes)

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

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

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

A man without a vote is man without protection.

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

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.

The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

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

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.

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

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.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

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

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

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

Heck by the time a man scratches his behind, clears his throat, and tells me how smart he is, we've already wasted fifteen minutes.

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.

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

When things haven't gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.

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.

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.

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.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.

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.

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

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.

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.

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.

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.

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

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

I believe the destiny of your generation - and your nation - is a rendezvous with excellence.

The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

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.

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

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

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.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

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