Lyndon B. Johnson > Quotes

“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson

“Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson

“The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.”
― President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Statue of Liberty, 10/03/1965

“[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.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“A man without a vote is a man without protection.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“President Lyndon Johnson's 10 point formula for success:
1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing.
2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe, old-hat kind of individual.
3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.
4. Don't be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all.
5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you.
6. Study to get the "scratchy" elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious.
7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest Christian basis, every msiunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances.
8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely.
9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment.
10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.”
― Lyndon Johnson

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Guns and bombs, rockets and warships, are all symbols of human failure.”
― Lyndon B Johnson

“Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“The noblest search is the search for excellence”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“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.”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson

“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.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved -- the Great Society.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“I'll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.”
― Lyndon Johnson

“We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.”
― Lyndon B Johnson

“Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize Oh man....I could be eating a slow learner.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Don't Spit in the Soup, We All Gotta Eat”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few we can solve by ourselves.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Victory is no longer a truth. It is only a word to describe who is left alive in the ruins”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too much football with his helmet off.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson