Quotes from Lyndon B. Johnson

Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep, I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can.... Have I done enough?

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

Every President wants to do right.

Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.

In modern warfare there are no victors; there are only survivors.

While you're saving your face you're losing your ass. Never trust a man whose eyes are too close to his nose. I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket. Better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

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

We still seek no wider war.

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war; we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.

Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.

We Americans know - although others appear to forget - the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.

Did you ever think that making a speech on economy is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

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 to let her have it.

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.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.

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

[E]very man, everywhere, should be free to develop his talents to their full potential - unhampered by arbitrary barriers of race or birth or income.

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

I am proud to be a member of a party that opens its doors to all men--and closes its hearts to none.