Lyndon B. Johnson quotes:

Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

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.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.

The 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.

It is important that the United States remain a two-party system. I'm a fellow who likes small parties and the Republican Party can't be too small to suit me.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.

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

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.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

In our home there was always prayer - aloud, proud and unapologetic.

I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad: that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength; our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

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.

Just like the Alamo, somebody damn well needed to go to their aid. Well, by God, I'm going to Viet Nam's aid!

The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.

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

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

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

Jack was out kissing babies while I was out passing bills. Someone had to tend the store.

This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

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

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

We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.

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

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

The presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger than he was; and no matter how big, not big enough for its demands.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

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.

There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.

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.

Every President wants to do right.

I'm the only president you've got.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.

I believe the destiny of your generation - and your nation - is a rendezvous with excellence.

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

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.

The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.

The Air Force comes in every morning and says, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb' ... And then the State Department comes in and says, 'Not now, or not there, or too much, or not at all.'

I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years. [Touting his underlying intentions for the "Great Society" programs, LBJ confided with two like-minded governors on Air Force One]

Air pollution is a threat to health, especially of older persons. It contributes significantly to the rising rates of chronic respiratory ailments. It stains our cities and towns with ugliness, soiling and corroding whatever it touches. Its damage extends to our forests and farmlands as well. The economic toll for our neglect amounts to billions of dollars each year.

Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

It's too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away.

America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

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.

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

It (the heart) is supposed in popular language, to be the seat sometimes, of courage, sometimes of affection, sometimes of honesty, or baseness.

Every child must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take. We want this not only for his sake - but for the nation's sake.

But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences, that no one can perceive, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power, but we will not surrender and we will not retreat, for behind our American pledge lies the determination and resources, I believe, of all of the American nation.

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.

Education is 'the guardian genius of our democracy.' Nothing really means more to our future, not our military defenses, not our missiles or our bombers, not our production economy, not even our democratic system of government. For all of these are worthless if we lack the brain power to support and sustain them.

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

If you let a bully come in your front yard, he'll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

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.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.

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.

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

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

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

No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

I'm gonna hunker down like a jack rabbit in a dust storm

We are now embarked on another venture to put the American dream to work in meeting the new demands of a new day. Once again we must start where men would improve their society have always known they must begin - with an educational system restudied, reinforced, and revitalized.

It means an educational system which does not simply equip the students to adjust to society, but which enables the student to challenge and to modify, and at times reject, if necessary, the received wisdom of his elders.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today's youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

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.

Extremism is the pursuit of the presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.

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.

Four. That's what I want you to remember. If you don't get your idea across in the first four minutes, you won't do it. Four sentences to a paragraph. Four letters to a word. The most important words in the English language all have four letters. Home. Love. Food. Land. Peace. . .I know peace has five letters, but any damn fool knows it should have four.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

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.

Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.

Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.

We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.

It now seems to be quite a thing to pull down the mighty from their seats and roll them in the mire. This practice deserves pronounced condemnation. Hero worship is a tremendous force in uplifting and strengthening. Humanity, let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great.

We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding, in and close to our cities. In the backcountry we need to copy the great Appalachian Trail in all parts of America.

Hug your friends tight, but your enemies tighter ? hug ?em so tight they can?t wiggle.

If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, don't keep her in the living room.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy's window, and say it smells like roses.

We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Did you ever think that making a speech on economy is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

Light at the end of the tunnel? We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is.

Government is best which is closest to the people. Yet that belief is betrayed by those State and local officials who engage in denying the right of citizens to vote. Their actions serve only to assure that their State governments and local governments shall be remote from the people, least representative of the people's will and least responsive to the people's wishes.

New laboratories and centers will help our schools lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and deserve special treatment.

In modern warfare there are no victors; there are only survivors.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

As man draws nearer to the stars, why should he not also draw nearer to his neighbor?

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

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.

Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.

A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

No national sovereignty rules in outer space. Those who venture there go as envoys of the entire human race. Their quest, therefore, must be for all mankind, and what they find should belong to all mankind.

Nothing so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth....Americans are stimulated by the big job; the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship.

Throughout my entire public career I have followed the personal philosophy that I am a free man, an American, a public servant, and a member of my party, in that order always and only.

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. 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.

I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women.

The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman-and each nation-must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.

It will help at every state along the road to learning. For the pre-school years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.

President Can't Swim.