Quotes from Harry S. Truman

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

There is a right kind and wrong kind of victory, just as there are wars for the right thing and wars that are wrong from every standpoint…. The kind of victory MacArthur had in mind—victory by the bombing of Chinese cities, victory by expanding the conflict to all of China—would have been the wrong kind of victory.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment.

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

My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference!

People say life is a story, I differ. It is an enactment of constantly changing, continuously edited , and precisely coordinated scenes, I would say.

Some of the Presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great Presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that.

The president is the representative of the whole nation and he's the only lobbyist that all the one hundred and sixty million people in the country have.

We must build a new world, a far better world -- one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." [ Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States , August 8, 1950]

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.

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

The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.

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

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself.

We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.

Tact is the ability to step on a man's toes without messing up the shine on his shoes.

The Republicans believe in the minimum wage -- the more the minimum, the better.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.