Quotes from Lyndon B. Johnson

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for good.

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 every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman-and each nation --must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.

The Negro says, 'Now.' Others say, 'Never.' The voice of responsible Americans ... says, 'Together.' There is no other way.

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.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this Deny your responsibility.

There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.

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

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.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

We Americans know-although others appear to forget-the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war. (On ordering retaliatory action against North Vietnam)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

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

T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

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

I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.

While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.