Top 100 Quotes About Truman
#1. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
Joshua Foer
#2. My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.
Jimmy Carter
#3. Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends.
David Pietrusza
#4. Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
#5. If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he [Harry Truman] would have promised to provide them with free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayers' expense.
H.L. Mencken
#6. [Truman] didn't want to fight the guy, whatever he was - alien, vampyr or douchebag.
J. Richard Singleton
#8. 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
#9. Everyone is against Harry (Truman) except the people.
Clark Griffith
#10. A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
Mary McCarthy
#12. Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him.
Rich Little
#14. Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's Fair Deal.
Robert A. Caro
#15. I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.
Gore Vidal
#16. Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
Michael Ignatieff
#17.
The whole world is three drinks behind. If everyone in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. If Stalin, Truman and everybody else in the world had three drinks right now, we'd all loosen up and we wouldn't need the United Nations.
Humphrey Bogart
#18. My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.
Alvin Ailey
#19. So, what is it that I bring to her?" [Angus]
"Strength. Security. Stability. All the best 's' words." [Truman]
Truman smirked and so did Angus.
Elizabeth Finn
#20. I would go to the all-night grocery store and pretend that I was at Studio 54 because it was the only place open all night. Truman Capote in the frozen foods. Andy Warhol over in vegetables.
James St. James
#21. He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]
Deborah Kerr
#22. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#23. The future promises us all our very own Truman Shows and when every man and woman is a star the spectacle becomes auto- cannibalizing; the audience forced to watch itself due to lack of spectators
Dean Cavanagh
#24. At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office.
Robert Dallek
#25. I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy - that's what the Democratic party ought to reach for.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#26. Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.
Steve Earle
#27. 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
#28. To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.
Truman Capote
Truman Capote
#29. 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
#30. I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.
Tennessee Williams
#31. My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman.
George Plimpton
#32. My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.
Dylan Penn
#33. Mr. Truman studiously avoided giving power to his White House staff that has been characteristic of recent administrations. Staff people in the White House, with no responsibility but incredible authority is one of the reasons we're now in so much trouble.
Stuart Symington
#34. But they all recognized the steady, no-nonsense influence Jack had had on Truman; he was the ballast to Truman's airy sails.
Melanie Benjamin
#35. 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
#36. It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.
Peter Weir
#37. Truman Flynn is a piece of paper in my coat pocket. He is a memory of water and of loss, his hand sliding free from mine, no way to hold on.
Brenna Yovanoff
#38. I think projects find me. It's really interesting. Everything I've done, from "The Truman Show," the "Eternal Sunshine" to "Yes Man" and "Bruce Almighty," always come into my life at the perfect time.
Jim Carrey
#39. I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.
Lee Iacocca
#40. I liked Truman very much. He was precise and businesslike. After a while, it was his turn.
Lord Mountbatten
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. If Truman hadn't published 'Answered Prayers' in parts, he'd have had the drive to finish it. The peacocks took it away from him.
Jack Dunphy
#44. Nobody wants to hear that you met Harry Truman ... I met Harry Truman ... But you know what I mean? Nobody's interested. They want to know you met Rihanna. And that kills me.
Joan Rivers
#45. 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
#46. Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.
Ken Hollings
#47. Truman's version was: "The only new thing in the world is the history we have not learned." And, in the House
Anonymous
#48. I'm very proud of what Harry Truman turned out to be in office and the record he made. Certainly I think he'll go down in history as one of the greats, because of his conscience, his determination to stick with what he knew was right.
Walter Cronkite
#49. Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.
Tim Weiner
#50. Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
Roger Ebert
#51. I would like to say that no man ever was given finer cooperation than that given me by President Truman.
Paul Hoffman
#52. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities?
James K. Morrow
#53. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, others, knew how to lead. They knew how to ask the American people for the right things.
John F. Kerry
#54. 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
#55. Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.
Douglas Brinkley
#56. In the first rule of politics, you know, Harry Truman, the buck stops here. Take responsibility. What I've learned over the years is that people will give people in politics a lot of rope if they just take responsibility.
Susan Estrich
#57. Almost everything Truman did in foreign affairs I approve of.
Stephen Ambrose
#58. 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
#59. Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.
Rick Perlstein
#60. We had been frightened of atomic weapons since 1945. In those days I became convinced and remain convinced now that, after Hitler , Truman was the greatest murderer in the world.
Martin Niemoller
#61. The most revered presidents - Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama - have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#62. My life is not unlike Truman's. I can't go anywhere.
Jim Carrey
#63. When you first saw 'The Truman Show,' did anyone else walk around for the next week not picking your nose just in case?
Anna Kendrick
#64. When contemplating General Eisenhower winning the Presidential election, Truman said, Hell sit here, and hell say, Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ikeit wont be a bit like the Army. Hell find it very frustrating.
Harry S. Truman
#65. Harry S. Truman, in his typical no-nonsense style, once said that 'An expert is someone who doesn't want to learn anything new, because then he would not be an expert.' Expert knowledge is absolutely necessary, but
Ha-Joon Chang
#66. Despite its flaws, the American electoral system has produced Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman.
Robert Dallek
#67. The clear suggestion is that there ought not to be civilian control of the military. What have callow noncombatants giving brisk orders to grizzled soldiers? How could Lincoln have fired the slavery-loving Gen. George B. McClellan, or Truman dismissed the glorious Douglas MacArthur?
Christopher Hitchens
#68. On the one hand X is true, but on the other hand, Y is true," Harry S. Truman is reported to have muttered in frustration, "Get me a one-armed economist!
Hal Herzog
#69. [ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
#70. It involves no disrespect for Mrs. Truman to say that her daughter gets a bigger hand than she does,' observed Richard Rovere. 'This country may be run by and for mothers, but its goddesses are daughters. Margaret's entrance comes closer than anything else to bringing down the house.
David Pietrusza
#71. 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
#72. Somebody had angrily scrawled DOPE HOUSE with a broad Sharpie above the apartment 6G peephole in the Truman Houses.
"The quality goes in before the name goes on," the CSU tech standing next to Billy said before entering the scene.
Harry Brandt
#73. I was in Independence, Missouri when Johnson signed the Medicare bill, with Truman standing there. Truman had first proposed Medicare, but couldn't get it through.
Helen Thomas
#74. I loved Harry Truman with all my heart and soul.
Willard Scott
#75. 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
#76. Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow," Truman
David McCullough
#77. Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century.
Charles Krauthammer
#78. We now have a lack of readiness that is quite scary. We have planes that were - that Harry Truman inaugurated, the B-52. We have - the Navy has been gutted and decimated. The readiness of the Marines is way down.
Jeb Bush
#79. I went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University.
Jenna Fischer
#80. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending.
Lynne Truss
#81. Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman.
Melanie Benjamin
#82. Harry Truman once said: "Find me a one-armed economist, because every one I know always says, 'Well, on the other hand . . .
Ronald Reagan
#83. The final word belongs to one of Truman's aides, George Elsey. "It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing," he commented subsequently. "The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.
William E. Leuchtenburg
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better." Harry S. Truman
Shar McBee
#87. There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn't.
Robert Dallek
#88. 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
#89. I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.
Jed S. Rakoff
#90. 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
#91. I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.
Betsy Lerner
#92. The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.
George Will
#93. Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.
Helen Thomas
#94. Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.
Victor Davis Hanson
#95. 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
#96. Hysterical in The Mask; funny yet moving in The Truman Show.
Jim Carrey
#97. And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up.
Alice Walker
#98. In 1940, then-Senator Harry Truman headed up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In the course of World War II, more than $15 billion in unnecessary and fraudulent defense spending was identified.
Bernie Sanders
#99. With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
David McCullough
#100. There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.
Robert Caro
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