Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

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

"We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

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

"Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time."

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

"The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure."

"While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass."

"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."

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

"We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else."

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

"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking."

"The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being."

"To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts."

"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."

"I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's."

"Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam."

"This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it."

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

"I'm the only president you've got."

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

"It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention."

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