Top 55 Quotes About President Truman
#1. All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's.
Conrad Black
#2. My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.
James Costos
#4. At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education.
Paul Hoffman
#5. I would like to say that no man ever was given finer cooperation than that given me by President Truman.
Paul Hoffman
#6. That was the principle of reparations to which President Truman agreed at Potsdam. And the United States will not agree to the taking from Germany of greater reparations than was provided by the Potsdam Agreement.
James F. Byrnes
#7. [President Truman] was free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.
Dean Acheson
#8. In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.
Stewart Udall
#9. I would say that President Roosevelt probably was more intimately in touch with the press corps at the White House than President Truman was.
Clifton Daniel
#10. 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
#11. The 112th Congress passed only 220 laws, the lowest number enacted by any Congress. In 1948, when President Truman called the 80th Congress a 'Do-Nothing' Congress, it had passed more than 900 laws.
Juan Williams
#12. In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.
Harry S. Truman
#13. My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.
Jimmy Carter
#14. President Harry S. Truman is said to have famously asked for a one-handed economist, noting that "all my economists say, on the one hand and on the other.
Greg Ip
#15. First ladies are doing a lot. But the job remains undefined, frequently misunderstood, and subject to political attacks far nastier in some ways than those any President has ever faced.
Margaret Truman Daniel
#16. 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
#17. Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.
Harry S. Truman
#18. He was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn't the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with ... Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader.
Harry S. Truman
#19. President Roosevelt proved that a President could serve for life. Truman proved that anyone could be elected. Eisenhower proved that your country can be run without a President.
Nikita Khrushchev
#20. As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
Thomas Frank
#21. Hi Allan, it's Harry'
'Which Harry?'
'Truman, Allan. Harry S. Truman, the president, damn it!'
'How nice! That was a good meal we had Mr President, thank you. I hope you weren't required to fly the plane home?
Jonas Jonasson
#23. One of the presidents we could have done without ... There are some things I admire about Tyler, but there were also plenty of things that weren't so admirable ... The reason I have a certain amount of grudging respect for John Tyler is that he knew his own mind and stuck to his decisions.
Harry S. Truman
#24. Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.
Robert Dallek
#25. Every President I think I've ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn't quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.
Billy Graham
#26. Being President is a little bit like riding a tiger. You have to keep riding, or else you will be swallowed up by it!
Harry S. Truman
#27. Within the first few months I discovered that being President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.
Harry Truman
#28. I enjoyed my new position as vice president, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for 10 years as a senator.
Harry S. Truman
#29. Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him.
Rich Little
#30. No one who has not had the responsibility can really understand what it is like to be President, not even his closest aides or members of his immediate family. There is no end to the chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President.
Harry S. Truman
#31. My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.
Harry S. Truman
#32. A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment.
Harry S. Truman
#33. I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to.
Harry S. Truman
#34. I tend to pair up Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower because they're the two presidents I can think of who most preferred laziness to labor ... There's not much else you can say about Harrison except that he was president of the United States.
Harry S. Truman
#35. Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel.
Dick Durbin
#37. The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him his is not.
Harry S. Truman
#38. The important thing is that the President be saved from his friends. Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. "Your friends will destroy you," Hassett pleaded. "It's all right, Bill," Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. "It's all right." Truman
David McCullough
#39. Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. "No, young man," said Truman, "I like to read myself awake." Thomas
David McCullough
#40. I would rather have peace in the world than be President.
Harry S. Truman
#41. I don't feel qualified to be president either, but I've got the job.
Harry S. Truman
#42. I consider Monroe a pretty minor president. In spite of the Monroe Doctrine. That's the only important thing he ever did more or less on his own, when you really get down to it.
Harry S. Truman
#43. Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
Harry S. Truman
#44. A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.
Harry S. Truman
#45. The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's.
Harry S. Truman
#46. It's tougher to be a football coach than the President of the United States. You've got four years as a president, and they guard you. A football coach doesn't have anyone to protect him when things go wrong.
Harry S. Truman
#47. [When her daughter suggested the President refer in his conversation with foreign dignitaries about lawn care to 'fertilizer' instead of to 'manure':] But remember, it took me almost thirty years to get him to call it manure.
Bess Truman
#48. If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.
Harry S. Truman
#49. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them do what they are supposed to do anyway. Truman
David McCullough
#50. The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#51. As Truman saw the presidency, the chief responsibility was to make decisions and he made some of the most difficult and far-reaching of any president. If not brilliant or eloquent, he was courageous and principled. The invisible something he brought to the office was character.
David McCullough
#52. When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.
Harry S. Truman
#53. The President is always abused. If he isn't, he isn't doing anything.
Harry S. Truman
#54. Some of the presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that.
Harry S. Truman
#55. I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was.
Harry Truman
