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.
— 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.
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.
In our home there was always prayer - aloud, proud and unapologetic.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe I'll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn't go to Harvard.
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.
They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.
This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.
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.
There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.
Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.
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.
The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.
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.
Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.
The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.
The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.
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.
We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
I'd rather give my life than be afraid to give it.
Freedom is not enough.
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'
What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.
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.
Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.
It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.
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.
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.
Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.
You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.
