Lbj's Quotes

#1. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.

Mark Steyn

#2. Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: It would kill him if he relaxed.

Robert A. Caro

#3. I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. [Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special Counsel Harry McPherson.]

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

#5. It's not 100 per cent clear to me what's working about Snapchat.

Brian Acton

#6. Food can be very transformational, and it can be more than just about a dish. That's what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.

Alice Waters

#7. He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.

Robert A. Caro

#8. The great sadness," Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, "was our ignorance - or innocence, if you like - which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions.

Tim Weiner

#9. The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

#10. It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

Junot Diaz

#11. It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.

Aubrey Beardsley

#12. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

Robert A. Caro

#13. I'll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#14. FDR, JFK, LBJ [all Democratic presidents ] we have a pretty long list of presidents who maybe were not entirely forthcoming with intelligence information before they went to war, so I'd be cautious against making legal cases against the administration.

Barack Obama

#15. For him (LBJ) food was not an indulgence but and intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one he could never fill up.

Jonathan Darman

#16. I'm kind of an emotional exhibitionist.

Juliana Hatfield

#17. A nation can survive its fools, even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within ... for the traitor appears not to be a traitor ... he rots the soul of a nation ... he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#18. No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it.

David Pietrusza

#19. Two platters of cashew chicken double delight, egg rolls, lumpia dogs, dessert, coffee" - she paused - "and this.

William Bernhardt

#20. The equality of tolerance is not that far from indifference, and very far from the equality of opportunity that LBJ envisioned.

Jedediah Purdy

#21. Consciousness Expansion went out with LBJ ... and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

Hunter S. Thompson

#22. A man without a vote is a man without protection.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#23. You trip and lance
Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub
It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance
Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping
Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab
The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping
The jellied iridescence of the crab.

Robert Lowell

#24. (LBJ) had what a journalist calls "a genius for analogy" - made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate

Robert A. Caro

#25. I once knew a chap who had a system of just hanging the baby on the clothes line to dry and he was greatly admired by his fellow citizens for having discovered a wonderful innovation on changing a diaper.

Damon Runyon

#26. [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

#27. I didn't want to take anybody else's money. I wanted to do something small that could be profitable from the beginning, and grow that way - and never need someone to write me a check to keep the business going.

Nick Woodman

#28. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.

Jonah Goldberg

#29. LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

Mark Steyn

#30. I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.

Helen Thomas

#31. If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.

Rush Limbaugh

#32. A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

Edmund Burke

#33. During his tenure as solicitor general Marshall solidified his relationship with LBJ over bourbon and Dr Pepper.

Evan Mandery

#34. Just because you're a Believer, doesn't mean your safe from the Hell-fire.

Nouman Ali Khan

#35. So Carlito think about this: all the apple-biting.

Randy Orton

#36. President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.

Robert A. Caro

#37. Eisenhower on LBJ: He hadn't got the depth of mind nor the breath vision to carry great responsibility.

David Pietrusza