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Quotes About Truman

The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.
~ George Will
The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it. President Truman famously asked for a "one-armed economist" who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, "On the other hand…
~ Daniel Kahneman
The Democrats' website is accurate when it says that the Democratic efforts for civil rights "began" with Truman in 1946, for there certainly is much about civil rights that they would rather not talk about before that time.
~ David Barton
I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities?
~ James Morrow
In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds. While employees had the right to hear of charges against them, accusers could withhold anything they designated as secret. Government workers did not have the right to know the identity of their accusers—often agents of the FBI—or to confront them in the hearings.
~ James T. Patterson
Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.
~ Steve Earle
Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage speaks to America's sense of decency and compassion. Democrats also believe that it will lead to a healthier and more productive country.
~ Bill Bradley
I have little patience with people who take the Bill of Rights for granted. The Bill of Rights, contained in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is every American's guarantee of freedom.
~ Harry S. Truman
You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.
~ Harry S. Truman
Well, we've only had a certain number of executions in the last few years- whatever it was- and two of them were for the personal convenience of Truman Capote.
~ William Frank Buckley, Jr.
He and Willoughby preferred that the Pentagon and the Truman administration be completely dependent upon them for any information about what was going on in their area of Asia—with no countervailing intelligence to limit his hand. Control intelligence, and you control decision-making.
~ David Halberstam
Harry Truman had no middle name, just an initial "S," which was a reference to his two grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman.
~ Jared Cohen
As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
~ Thomas Frank
Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.
~ Robert Dallek
the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened.
~ William Strauss
Yet Barkley drew back. Perhaps he, like Harry Truman, knew that the quiet power of incumbency easily overcomes the noise of crowds and bands.
~ David Pietrusza
Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's "Fair Deal.
~ Robert A. Caro
On July 2, 1960, a few weeks before that year's Democratic National Convention, former President Harry Truman publicly stated that John F Kennedy—who had won enough delegates to be chosen his party's candidate for the presidency—was too young and inexperienced for the job.
~ Robert Greene
American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
It was at this point that Truman once again sought Marshall's help. With his enthusiastic support, in July 1947 the president had succeeded in inducing Congress to pass the National Security Act, creating a new Department of Defense to replace the separate War and Navy Departments that had coexisted—and squabbled—since the early days of the republic.
~ Debi Unger
Truman deeply sympathized with the plight of Europe's displaced Jews.
~ Debi Unger
In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.
~ Stewart Udall
Presidents Truman and Nixon left office under dark clouds of scandal and with abysmal levels of support, but with the passage of time, both have been reassessed far more positively.
~ Monica Crowley
William H. Davis, then director of the government's Office of Economic Stabilization, estimated that industry was so profitable it could raise wages as much as 40 to 50 percent without raising prices. President Harry S. Truman, who felt he had enough on his plate without getting involved in management-labor disputes, repudiated Davis's calculation and announced Davis was out of a job.
~ Robert B. Reich