Quotes By Harry S. Truman

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

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.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

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.

If I'd known how much packing I'd have to do, I'd have run again.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

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.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

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

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.

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

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

It's plain hokum. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em. It's an old political trick. But this time it won't work.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.

The buck stops here!

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

A President cannot always be popular.

The atom bomb was no "great decision." It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

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!

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.

All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

It sure is hell to be president.

When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril.

Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

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.

Well, I wouldn't say that I was in the great class, but I had a great time while I was trying to be great.