Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

Doing what is right isn't the problem it's knowing what is right.

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

A president's hardest task is not to do what's right but to know what's right.

There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress and that is continuously incessantly and without interruption. If it's really going to work the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

While you're saving your face you're losing your ass. Never trust a man whose eyes are too close to his nose. I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket. Better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

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

[T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Already a congressman, to a mentor "I hope sometime you run across something you think I can do well 24 hours per day.

Doing what's right isn't the problem. It's knowing what's right.

Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!"In 1966 upon being told that President Charles DeGaulle had taken France out of NATO and that all U.S. troops must be evacuated off of French soil President Lyndon Johnson mentioned to Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he should ask DeGaulle about the Americans buried in France. Dean implied in his answer that that DeGaulle should not really be asked that in the meeting at which point President Johnson then told Secretary of State Dean Rusk:"Ask him about the cemeteries Dean!"That made it into a Presidential Order so he had to ask President DeGaulle.So at end of the meeting Dean did ask DeGaulle if his order to remove all U.S. troops from French soil also included the 60,000+ soldiers buried in France from World War I and World War II.DeGaulle, embarrassed, got up and left and never answered.

If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness…if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other…then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

The world has narrowed to a neighbourhood before it has broadened to a brotherhood.

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way and the other to let her have it.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

Yesterday is not ours to recover but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.

Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can.... Have I done enough?

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First let her think she's having her own way. And second let her have it.