Quotes By Lyndon B. Johnson

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.

The presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger than he was; and no matter how big, not big enough for its demands.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

In our home there was always prayer - aloud, proud and unapologetic.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.

We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

You've got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you've got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

If the American people don't love me, their descendants will.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

You aren't learning anything when you're talking.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: "President Can't Swim."

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

I'd rather give my life than be afraid to give it.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.

No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Freedom is not enough.