Top 100 Lyndon Johnson Sayings
#1. The second most powerful man in the country." All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking "nothing jobs" and making them into something - something big. And now, no sooner
Robert A. Caro
#2. Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.
Robert Caro
#3. Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party.
Robert Caro
#4. Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Robert Caro
#5. I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.
Phil Hartman
#6. Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.
Eileen Myles
#7. One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave - arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.
Robert Dallek
#8. From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson's political life - from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics - his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.
Robert A. Caro
#9. The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear.
Paul Johnson
#10. 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
#11. Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.
George Friedman
#12. Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.
David Maraniss
#13. Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.
Robert A. Caro
#14. Little boy crying. "My daddy has been dead for 10 yrs, but he came to town to vote for Lyndon Johnson, and didn't come to see me.
Robert Cato
#15. My mother missed having dinner with Lyndon Johnson because she couldn't find the right hat to wear. While my father went off to the white house to break bread with the President, my mother, who's not a things and stuff person, stayed at the hotel and tried on 10 different hats and missed dinner.
Emilio Estevez
#16. Presidents and Lyndon Johnson was really no exception, very rapidly learned the difference between a contingency plan and an authorized act.
McGeorge Bundy
#17. You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#18. As several historians have pointed out, it would have made little sense for Fidel to do something that would risk having his country invaded in retaliation, just to make Lyndon Johnson President.
Lamar Waldron
#19. Back in the '40's, Lyndon Johnson could still steal a Senate election in South Texas with the help of the big patrons.
Calvin Jillson
#20. It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
Salman Rushdie
#21. Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Jeff Greenfield
#22. (President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.
Rick Perlstein
#23. Lyndon Johnson rose above the doubt and fear to hold this Nation on course until we rediscovered our faith in ourselves.
Richard M. Nixon
#24. If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
Jeff Greenfield
#25. In the last 100 years only Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford lost their bids for reelection. President Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term.
Juan Williams
#26. People in the age of [President] Obama don't dress like they did in the age of [Lyndon] Johnson. That's for sure.
Al Sharpton
#27. The assassin's bullet: Lee Harvey Oswald created a constitutional space for decisive legislative action, opening a path for Lyndon Johnson to save the civil rights revolution at the cost of destroying the New Deal coalition.
Bruce A. Ackerman
#29. Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#30. Under (Lyndon) Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy. All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles.
Bobby Baker
#31. While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men - a great reader of men.
Robert A. Caro
#32. We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.
Robert A. Caro
#33. David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
David Halberstam
#34. Determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called "listening"),
Robert A. Caro
#35. In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.
Joe Lhota
#36. If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
#37. President Lyndon Johnson was very, very unpredictable. We never knew for sure what he is going to do next, and he preferred to have it that way; if he could do something as a complete surprise, that was his preference.
Clint Hill
#38. Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.
Bob Gunton
#39. I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.
Jack Valenti
#40. Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.
Robert Dallek
#41. I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.
Richard Holbrooke
#42. When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.
George Lois
#43. Volumes in the series on Lyndon Johnson, including Master of the Senate and The Path Power, describe how Johnson created resources out of nothing and built a substantial power base.
Jeffrey Pfeffer
#44. Dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.
Robert A. Caro
#46. Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his own approach accordingly. One of the reasons he has so fascinated biographer Robert Caro over the years is Johnson's consummate skill in acquiring and using influence.
Jeffrey Pfeffer
#47. The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.
Jay Parini
#48. Reagan understood an important distinction that (Lyndon) Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren't always the same thing.
Jonathan Darman
#49. Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.
Bill Moyers
#50. Lyndon Johnson's sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.
Robert A. Caro
#51. Lyndon Johnson bared his scars, American ... stars 'n bars.
Neil Young
#52. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.
Robert A. Caro
#53. I swore then and there," Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it." It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that my dream began of an America ... where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you.
Robert A. Caro
#54. Bobby Kennedy's conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president.
Thomas Mallon
#55. It may not be too late, whatever happens, if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me. But if I am eliminated, there won't be any way of knowing.
Jack Ruby
#56. President Lyndon Johnson once said, "If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it is a bureaucracy." Don
Robert M. Gates
#57. Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.
Robert Dallek
#58. A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.
Robert A. Caro
#59. During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.
Robert Dallek
#60. Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
Christopher Buckley
#61. Not much ever really comes of commissions, really. The last one that really came up with something truly concrete was the Warren Commission, and for all its good work, most Americans persist in believing that Oswald was working in tandem with the CIA, FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and the John Birch Society.
Christopher Buckley
#62. All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#63. Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's Fair Deal.
Robert A. Caro
#64. Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background.
Tom Wicker
#65. I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.
David Edelstein
#66. You know when I first thought I might have a chance? When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.
Eugene McCarthy
#67. Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
Thomas Sowell
#68. Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam were perfect for Lyndon Johnson: 220 million against 18 million, water buffalo and all. No risk, really.
David Douglas Duncan
#69. Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, I suppose, Jimmy Carter. They balance their tickets with senior statesmen - Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Walter Mondale. (Al Gore was young but played ancient).
Joe Klein
#70. ****your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good. President Lyndon Johnson to the Greek ambassador in Washington (1964)
Richard Clogg
#71. I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world.
Robert Caro
#72. Tell the Truth, and speak from your pay-grade. Don't try to answer questions that would better be directed to the battalion commander or Gen. William Westmoreland or President Lyndon Johnson. If you are a squad leader, answer questions about what you know and do.
Hal Moore
#73. After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.
Martin Filler
#74. He [Lyndon Johnson] hated the war. He hated having anybody put in harm away. But he believed that what we were doing is what we had to do for our commitments with SEATO, for many reasons. And he was carrying forth a policy that he had inherited. And he tried and got us to the peace table in 1968.
Lynda Bird Johnson Robb
#75. 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.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#76. Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different,' in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#78. We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#79. A President must call on many persons
some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#80. The time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#81. Once we considered education a public expense; we know now that it is a public investment.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#82. Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#83. People do not come out to vote for a United States Senator. They come out to vote for the Sheriff or the County Commissioner.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#84. I am making a collection of the things my opponents have found me to be and, when this election is over, I am going to open a museum and put them on display.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#85. Let no one ever think for a moment that national debate means national division.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#86. Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#87. History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education ... I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#88. Extremism is the pursuit of the presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#89. We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding, in and close to our cities. In the backcountry we need to copy the great Appalachian Trail in all parts of America.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#90. 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.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#91. All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#92. Second, this law has become a special symbol of our Nation's most important purpose: to fulfill the individual - his freedom, his happiness, his promise.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#93. Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#94. When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#95. 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.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#96. New laboratories and centers will help our schools lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and deserve special treatment.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#97. "All men are created equal." "Government by consent of the governed." "Give me liberty or give me death." And those are not just clever words, and those are not just empty theories.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#99. Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#100. Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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