Quotes from Lyndon B. Johnson

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.

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

The world has narrowed to a neighbourhood before it has broadened to a brotherhood.

Whoever won't fight when the President calls him, deserves to be kicked back in his hole and kept there.

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.

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

Jack was out kissing babies while I was out passing bills. Someone had to tend the store.

In a thousand unseen ways we have drawn shape and strength from the land.

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.

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

Success only feeds the appetite of aggression.

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

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

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.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

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

Son, when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he's a nigger. [Said to an aide in 1965 regarding the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court]

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.

Let's face it. Our ass is in a crack. We're gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. [Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957]

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities ... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

There's America, there's the South, and then there's Mississippi.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. 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.