logo

Quotes About Truman

he knew that the horror of the Holocaust cried out for redress, and that only a Jewish homeland could provide safe harbor for Jews seeking shelter and safety around the world. How long would Harry Truman agonize over this fateful decision?
~ Joe Scarborough
If Truman hadn't published 'Answered Prayers' in parts, he'd have had the drive to finish it. The peacocks took it away from him.
~ Jack Dunphy
Almost everything Truman did in foreign affairs I approve of.
~ Stephen Ambrose
The biggest blunder in the history of this country was when President Truman pulled General MacArthur out of China.
~ Tiny Tim
Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
~ Roger Ebert
Truman seethed. "I put it to you," he railed during a campaign stop in Indianapolis during his famous come-from-behind reelection campaign in 1948. "Is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity!
~ Ron Powers
In August, President Truman made the decision that death had spared Roosevelt from having to make. Truman ordered the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).
~ Russell Freedman
I dislike people who are forever getting into shape. I am in terrible shape and haven't exercised since the Truman administration.
~ Elizabeth Gundy
Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.
~ Douglas Brinkley
I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!
~ Harry S. Truman
Nixon said in a recent interview that 'the FBI and Hoover played no role whatsoever in the Hiss case thing. Hoover was loyal to Truman … There was no way that he was going to have his boys running about helping the Committee.
~ Anthony Summers
Harry Truman wrote scathing letters, but he almost never sent them.
~ Robert Dallek
Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping and having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944, saved - saved millions of American lives.
~ Bobby Knight
Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.
~ Lawrence Kudlow
I loved Harry Truman with all my heart and soul.
~ Willard Scott
Eisenhower was a pretty peace-oriented president. Truman was a pretty hawkish. I would argue, if we had more time, I would argue Truman had a lot to do with getting the Cold War going.
~ Robert Scheer
Is so-and-so a bigger asshole than Truman?" Few could compare—in fact, so far, officially, there was only Donald Trump and cannibals.
~ Stephen King
Truman knew, Republicans would duck responsibility and attack the White House for partisan gain.
~ Benn Steil
But like every good American, Truman knew he hated Communism. He also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing. No one seemed quite sure. Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism—imported by comical German immigrants with noses always in books—was an ominous specter, calculated to derange a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care, and other Devil's work still being fiercely resisted a century and a half later.
~ Gore Vidal
On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress to proclaim what would be known as the Truman Doctrine, in which he targeted our ally of two years earlier as the enemy. The subject at hand was a civil war in Greece, supposedly directed by the Soviet. We could not tolerate this as, suddenly, "the policy of the United States [is] to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." Thus
~ Gore Vidal
At one point, Ferrell notes that Truman actually gave thought to the sufferings of women and children should we go nuclear in Korea. As for Truman's original decision to use two atomic bombs on Japan, most now agree that a single demonstration would have been quite enough to cause a Japanese surrender while making an attractive crater lake out of what had been Mount Fujiyama's peak.
~ Gore Vidal
In 1940, then-Senator Harry Truman headed up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In the course of World War II, more than $15 billion in unnecessary and fraudulent defense spending was identified.
~ Bernie Sanders
Harry Truman was courageous enough to command that racial segregation be ended in the military. I was serving in a submarine in the U.S. Navy at the time he issued the order.
~ Jimmy Carter
Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed "the use of force or the threat of the use of force" against Iran, and that Truman himself had "stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.
~ Stephen Kinzer