Quotes About President Johnson

#1. Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

Bob Dylan

#2. President Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.

Daniel Ellsberg

#3. President Johnson offered the middle of the road.

Lew Wasserman

#4. The consequences of President Johnson's campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself.

Eric Alterman

#5. Medicare is a promise we made to seniors more than four decades ago. When President Johnson signed Medicare into law, one in three seniors lived in poverty. Half of seniors had no health coverage at all.

John Garamendi

#6. Well, Hale was one of the first people who suggested to President Johnson that there should be a commission.

Lindy Boggs

#7. President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we're both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.

Richard M. Nixon

#8. [President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

Anna Quindlen

#9. I am very proud to come back, to speak on the disinterested effort we have made and I believe that, with all due respect, that the decisions we made, when we turned our final report over to President Johnson, will stand in history.

John Sherman Cooper

#10. On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded - that all people are created equal.

Thomas Perez

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

Robert A. Caro

#12. It is profoundly important to honor President Johnson's historic contributions to justice and democracy - and to appreciate how hard he fought for the rights of every Texan and every American.

Marc Veasey

#13. I have told friends and supporters who are urging me to run that I would not oppose President Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.

Robert Kennedy

#14. President Kennedy knew every agent by name. President Johnson knew many of us, but not as many as President Kennedy, probably.

Clint Hill

#15. President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.

William Westmoreland

#16. I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.

J. William Fulbright

#17. President Johnson had a habit of throwing dollars at a question and the question would disappear.

Wilbur Mills

#18. Mr. Chairman, I think the record should show that for the first time since McKinley, we have a Republican president worth shooting, and I think that's a good sign.

James Johnson

#19. 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

#20. Every President wants to do right.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#21. The American people on the ground need a clearer, stronger, Lyndon B. Johnson-type voice from their president.

Jesse Jackson

#22. But to make a long story short, I decided that I was going to run, and I announced that I was going to run for president in Florida, I would be the favorite son from Florida, and that would stop Johnson and Kennedy from dividing up the state.

George Smathers

#23. We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block.

John F. Kerry

#24. I agree with President Roosevelt, and generations since, that American seniors deserve better than poverty.

Hank Johnson

#25. I will not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#26. A President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

#28. President Can't Swim.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#29. I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.

Jack Valenti

#30. 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

#31. The myopic obsession of the Tea Party with destroying health care reform and wounding the president has led Republicans astray.

Hank Johnson

#32. It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.

Lyndon Johnson

#33. I walked out of Spielberg's 'Lincoln' having such a thirst for more. It used such a microscopic albeit enormous event in American history. It used such a small piece of his presidency to illustrate him as a president through the lens of that event.

Jesse Johnson

#34. The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#35. Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition ... well, they are still radical ideas.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#36. Don't ever feel sad about who you are. Don't wish to be a daughter or son to a wealthy home, just because you think you're poor. Look! Everybody's poor, i discovered it when i realized that its not everything that President Barrack Obama has.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#37. One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#38. When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Rick Perlstein

#39. 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

#40. I never, ever, when I entered this process of running for president of the United States, thought I would be excluded from the debate table. Ever. What does two terms as governor get you?

Gary Johnson

#41. ****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

#42. There is no inherent power in the office of the vice presidency. Zero. None. It's all a reflection of your relationship with the president. I mean, Kennedy never let Johnson in the office.

Joe Biden

#43. 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

#44. If there was ever a president who could be called our Charlie Browniest, it would be Andrew Johnson.

Daniel O'Brien

#45. Governors were once minors. Presidents were once residents.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#46. The 1960s:
A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls.

Richard Brautigan

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

#48. The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.

Barack Obama

#49. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.

Henry Rollins

#50. Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.

Denis Johnson

#51. We have seven months before the election. Our top priority as fiscal conservatives is to make sure President Obama retires.

Ron Johnson

#52. Lydon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.

Nancy Gibbs

#53. If our next president is a woman, it will be Hilary Clinton and our country will be all the better for it.

Calvin Johnson

#54. Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

Robert Dallek

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. The passions and pain of the Vietnam War have subsided to a degree to which we are now able to look at the broader achievements of the Johnson administration," said playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Broadway show about the president, "All the Way," is playing to packed houses.

The Washington Post

#59. My most fervent prayer is to be a President who can make it possible for every boy in this land to grow to manhood by loving his country
instead of dying for it.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#60. Strength with which President Kennedy dispatched his enemies" - a tribute couched in rather remarkable words: Johnson described Kennedy "when he looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching.

Robert A. Caro

#61. A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

Glenn Greenwald

#62. Getting elected Governor of New Mexico, I really did enjoy that job. I thought I made a really big difference, and I think the same running for president of the United States - that I could make a really big, positive difference.

Gary Johnson

#63. One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

George Packer

#64. Abby Johnson has agreed to become Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity, reflecting a further step forward in our leadership succession plan. Abby will retain her role of President, and I will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board.

Edward Johnson, III

#65. Women are not tools, strong women move mountain. Treat them with respect the way you would treat your president, father, daughter, son, sister or mom. Because without them humanity perish.

Henry Johnson Jr

#66. I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.

Stephen Ambrose

#67. No one is above the law, not even the president. I believe perjury does meet at least the definition of high misdemeanor.

Nancy Johnson

#68. I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Eighty percent of the problems that beset unification immediately disappeared when the President signed the bill increasing the authority and the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense.

Louis A. Johnson

#73. Lincoln replied:"There is a difference between secession against the Constitution and in favor of the Constitution.

Clint Johnson

#74. 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

#75. I have learned something about the job of being the President's wife. She is not chosen by anyone except her husband and she really has no obligations except to him.

Lady Bird Johnson

#76. Right now the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President. But don't forget: I am G.I. Joe.

Dwayne Johnson

#77. 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

#78. (President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

Rick Perlstein

#79. I am actually one of those who took President Obama at his word when he first ran - that he would get us out of ill-advised wars, that he would do something about health care costs, and that he would protect civil liberties. Like many Americans, I was disappointed.

Gary Johnson

#80. We now have a president who tries to save money by turning off lights in the White House, even as he heads toward a staggering addition to the national debt. "L.B.J." should stand for Light Bulb Johnson.

Barry Goldwater

#81. I liked Kennedy. So far, he is the only American president who could talk with me and with whom I could talk. I know Johnson, but I have not yet a clear opinion of him.

Sukarno

#82. A good president does with executive power what Pablo Picasso did with paint. He takes bills into new and slightly discomfiting territory. He puts extra eyes on policies. He moves the mouth of the Supreme Court from where it should be to where it must be.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#83. 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

#84. Whoever won't fight when the President calls him, deserves to be kicked back in his hole and kept there.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#85. Unlike President Obama, I am not afraid to state, without a wink or a nod, that the government has no right to tell us who we can marry or not marry.

Gary Johnson

#86. 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

#87. A hastily written "Civil Rights Act" was rushed through Congress. President Andrew Johnson immediately vetoed it, noting that the right to confer citizenship rested with the several states, and that "the tendency of the bill is to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion".

Eustace Mullins

#88. We have never had a more qualified and capable champion of personal and economic freedom than the 2012 Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States - Governor Gary Johnson.

Scott Boman

#89. I'm the only president you've got.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#90. Mr. Obama would be a disheartening president even during a super boom, with his grim demeanor and empty rhetoric, as well as his obvious hatred of business bravado.

Paul Johnson

#91. 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

#92. People in power will lie to keep it. Honesty doesn't make you less human.

Henry Johnson Jr

#93. Love it or hate it, Obamacare is the law of the land. It was passed by Congress, signed into law by President Obama, declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and ratified by a majority of Americans, who reelected the president for a second term.

Hank Johnson

#94. Presidents and Lyndon Johnson was really no exception, very rapidly learned the difference between a contingency plan and an authorized act.

McGeorge Bundy

#95. What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#96. 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

#97. Unless things change radically, President Bush will be the first President since Herbert Hoover to have presided over a net loss of jobs during his administration.

Tim Johnson