“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson
“Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“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
“We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“[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
“A man without a vote is a man without protection.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“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
“President Lyndon Johnson’s 10 point formula for success:
1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing.
2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe, old-hat kind of individual.
3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.
4. Don’t be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all.
5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you.
6. Study to get the “scratchy” elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious.
7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest Christian basis, every msiunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances.
8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely.
9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone’s achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment.
10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.”
― Lyndon Johnson
“I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Guns and bombs, rockets and warships, are all symbols of human failure.”
― Lyndon B Johnson
“Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“The noblest search is the search for excellence”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness…if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other…then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson
“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved — the Great Society.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.”
― Lyndon B Johnson
“Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“It’s not doing what is right that’s hard for a President. It’s knowing what is right.”
― Lyndon Johnson
“I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Don’t Spit in the Soup, We All Gotta Eat”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant I’m halfway through my fish burger and I realize Oh man….I could be eating a slow learner.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Victory is no longer a truth. It is only a word to describe who is left alive in the ruins”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“He’s [Nixon] like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards. You’ll see; he’ll do something wrong in the end. He always does.”
― Lyndon Baines Johnson
“As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture. [Said to his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.”]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few we can solve by ourselves.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences – deep, corrosive, obstinate differences – radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose”
― Lyndon Johnson
“He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too much football with his helmet off.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. [Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences – deep, corrosive, obstinate differences – radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose”
― Lyndon Johnson
“He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too much football with his helmet off.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. [Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities … Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Son, when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger. [Said to an aide in 1965 regarding the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“There’s America, there’s the South, and then there’s Mississippi.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years. [Said to two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to then-Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“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
“Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.[To hi chauffer Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.”]”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“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
“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
“He wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner version which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”
― Lyndon Johnson
“Power is where power goes.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Already a congressman, to a mentor “I hope sometime you run across something you think I can do well 24 hours per day.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“Change has brought new meaning to that old mission. We can never again stand aside, prideful in isolation. Terrific dangers and troubles that we once called “foreign” now constantly live among us. If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.
Think of our world as it looks from the rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. And each of us, in the span of time, has really only a moment among our companions.
How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another. There are possibilities enough for all who will abandon mastery over others to pursue mastery over nature. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way.
Our Nation’s course is abundantly clear. We aspire to nothing that belongs to others. We seek no dominion over our fellow man. but man’s dominion over tyranny and misery.
But more is required. Men want to be a part of a common enterprise–a cause greater than themselves. Each of us must find a way to advance the purpose of the Nation, thus finding new purpose for ourselves. Without this, we shall become a nation of strangers.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
“How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson