Quotes By Lyndon B. Johnson

It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anybody has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

When things haven't gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right.

When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

The moon and other celestial bodies should be free for exploration and use by all countries. No country should be permitted to advance a claim of sovereignty.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.

I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

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.

Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

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

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

I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.

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.

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.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

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.