Top 1200 President Lyndon Johnson Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Much of the conventional wisdom associated with Vietnam was highly inaccurate. Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration.

I believe that the worst thing the liberals did in this country was the Lyndon Johnson welfare system, which broke up millions of marriages by funneling taxpayers' money solely to the woman. That made the father and husband irrelevant.

I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work

I do not think anyone who ever saw Lyndon Johnson give a speech would call him charismatic, even though he was one of the most effective presidents in U.S. history. Same with Lincoln. Charisma is only one source of power, and probably not a very important one, at that.

Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.

I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep.

Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, I suppose, Jimmy Carter. They balance their tickets with senior statesmen - Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Walter Mondale. (Al Gore was young but played ancient).

Religion's voice has been taken away. It was taken away by Lyndon Johnson in the 1970s because of a dispute he had, I think, with the church. And this was his way of silencing the church.

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.

All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.

I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world

Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.

Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican. And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson - trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty.

Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam were perfect for Lyndon Johnson: 220 million against 18 million, water buffalo and all. No risk, really.

Of course it would be great to have more scientists in Congress. But what I'd love is to have another Lyndon Johnson in Congress who makes climate change his first priority. We need people who know how to work the system and the institution.

Do I trust Yasser Arafat? Of course not. Why should I? Why should anyone trust a politician, whether Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, or Yasser Arafat?

You know when I first thought I might have a chance? When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.

Those days [of the Vietnam War] you couldn't get on a bus going to the South without expecting a riot over something or the other. All of that has disappeared thanks to Lyndon Johnson.

A key to McMaster's thinking is his 1997 book, 'Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.'

Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

[Lyndon Baines Johnson ] technique in negotiation would be that he'd lean into you and take away your personal space, it didn't matter your party affiliation when he was trying to convince you of something.

I call upon both Republicans and Democrats to work with us to have a national ID card that is free and accessible. President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King recognized was the greatest step for society was that short step into the voting booth. If we are to be true to their courage and conviction, we must make that short step as easy as possible. Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.

Lyndon Johnson is still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life. He was huge, a huge character, not only standing six feet four, but when you talked to him, he violated the normal human space between people. He was a great storyteller. The problem was that half his stories, I discovered, weren't true.

I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world.

In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.

The Democrats' drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court - a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.

If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

It took me five years on Lyndon Johnson, ten years on the Kennedys, six years on the Roosevelts. Inevitably, you get shaped by the people that you're thinking about during that period of time.

I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him.

The consequences of President Johnson's campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself.

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley.

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background.

Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.

When Kennedy could not get the civil rights bill passed - and he was the big liberal - Lyndon Johnson came in and it got passed, and he was the conservative and the southerner. So sometimes in politics, to get something done, it takes a special kind of knowledge and a special kind of person, but it doesn't always follow the party lines.

Three American presidents-Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson-have asked the question: What do we get from aiding Pakistan? Five-Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama-have wondered aloud whether Pakistan's leaders can be trusted to keep their word.

The unraveling of America's long mid-century domestic consensus, which ran from about 1941 to 1966, had begun earlier, under Lyndon B. Johnson.

He (Lyndon B. Johnson) wanted to see poverty, so he came to see my team (1964 New York Mets).

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.

Not much ever really comes of commissions, really. The last one that really came up with something truly concrete was the Warren Commission, and for all its good work, most Americans persist in believing that Oswald was working in tandem with the CIA, FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and the John Birch Society.

President Kennedy knew every agent by name. President Johnson knew many of us, but not as many as President Kennedy, probably.

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.

Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party.

I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.

Back in the '60s, for example, just as inflation was beginning to be a big problem, Presidents J.F.Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would often publicly browbeat companies for raising prices and threatening to move federal defense purchases to different countries.

Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.

When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.

I was introduced to Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson. The young Congressman was very friendly.

Throughout American history, we have elected presidents who had not been honest man. Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson just to name a few.

President Johnson offered the middle of the road.

Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.

He [Lyndon Johnson] hated the war. He hated having anybody put in harm away. But he believed that what we were doing is what we had to do for our commitments with SEATO, for many reasons. And he was carrying forth a policy that he had inherited. And he tried and got us to the peace table in 1968.