Quotes from Harry S Truman

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it - not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.

If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on.

All through history it's the nations that have given most to generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall

The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it - not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

The absence of war is not peace.

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

How far would have Moses gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt

I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have - When he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do.

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar. . . . .He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

Peace is precious to us. It is the way of life we strive for with all the strength and wisdom we possess. But more precious than peace are freedom and justice. We will fight, if fight we must, to keep our freedom and to prevent justice from being destroyed.

Take a two-mile walk every morning before breakfast.