Lyndon Baines Johnson often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969, and previously as 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963. He assumed the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A Democrat from Texas, Johnson was also a United States representative and later majority leader in the United States Senate. Johnson is one of only four people to have served, at various times, in all four federal elected positions. This Lyndon B Johnson quotes will motivate you.
Best Lyndon B Johnson Quotes
- “I’ll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven’t given up trying.” ~ Lyndon B. 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
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. 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 quotes
- “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.” ~ 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
- “Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine,’ or ‘His beliefs are strange and different,’ in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Heck by the time a man scratches his behind, clears his throat, and tells me how smart he is, we’ve already wasted fifteen minutes.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“The noblest search is the search for excellence.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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
- “When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by others, let them reflect how little they have contributed to the happiness of others.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone’s achievement.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “‘If you let a bully come in and chase you out of your front yard, he’ll be on your porch and the next day he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Light at the end of the tunnel? We don’t even have a tunnel; we don’t even know where the tunnel is.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“Democrats legislate; Republicans investigate.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing. For, though in every age there are some who, by bold adventures, or by favorable accidents, rise suddenly to riches, yet it is dangerous to indulge hopes of such rare events; and the bulk of mankind must owe their affluence to small and gradual profits, below which their expense must be resolutely reduced.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “I’m gonna hunker down like a jackrabbit in a dust storm” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “The job, of course, will never be finished. For a nation, as for an individual, education is a perpetually unfinished journey, a continuing process of discovery.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “The Organization of American States couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “We have always believed that our people can stand on no higher ground than the school ground, or can enter any more hopeful room than the classroom. We blend time and faith and knowledge in our schools – not only to create educated citizens but also to shape the destiny of this great Republic.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “It’s the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we’ll have to fight in San Francisco.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “But if future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it, not just as it looked when we got through with it.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “We believe, that is, you and I, that education is not an expense. We believe it is an investment.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “If we must disagree, let’s disagree without being disagreeable.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “In 1790, the nation which had fought a revolution against taxation without representation discovered that some of its citizens weren’t much happier about taxation with representation.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
-
“If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “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.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don’t want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “In my state, on the basis of the separate but equal doctrine, we have made enormous strides over the years in the education of both races. Personally, I think it would have been sounder judgment to allow that progress to continue through the process of natural evolution. However, there is no point crying about spilt milk.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “If you’re I politics and you can’t tell when you walk into a room who’s for you and who’s against you, then you’re in the wrong line of work.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
