- I accepted the second spot because I'm a gambling man. I did my research and one in four dies in office.
- I felt I was a trustee to carry on after he [assassinated President John F. Kennedy] had been taken from us. After I finished the execution of his dream, I had some of my own.
- [About President John F. Kennedy's assassination] "We heard some sounds. Some thought it was a firecracker, some thought it was a gun, but the next thing I knew we were on our way to the hospital. The president was wounded. The greatest shock that I can recall was one of the men saying 'He's gone'. It was suggested that we go the the planes as quickly as we could and that we get to Washington as quickly as we could. We had decided that we would wait until Mrs. Kennedy and President Kennedy's body were onboard. We were there 15 minutes before I took the oath"
- [March 31, 1968, announcing his decision not to seek re-election] I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
- [in 1964, paraphrasing his presidential opponent Barry Goldwater] Extremism in the pursuit of the presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue.
- If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read 'President Can't Swim'.
- [Gerald Ford] is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time.... He's a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.
- "I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.... [Richard Nixon]'s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths, and then turns around and runs backwards. You'll see; he'll do something wrong in the end. He always does.
- [on J. Edgar Hoover, as quoted in the New York Times / 31 October 1971] It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
- We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.
- [to his biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin] I will not let you take me backward in time to Vietnam. Fifty thousand American boys are dead. Nothing we can say will change that fact. Your idea that I could have chosen otherwise rests upon complete ignorance. For if I had chosen otherwise, I would have been responsible for starting World War III.
- Nixon can be beaten. He's like a Spanish horse who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards. You'll see. He'll do something wrong in the end. He always does.
- [on assuming the Presidency, November 22, 1963] I took the oath. I became president. But for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate - a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up. The whole thing was almost unbearable.
- I want people around me who would kiss my ass on a hot summer's day and say it smells like roses.
- [to Harry Truman, regarding 'The Presidents Club'] I just want you to know that as long as I'm in office you are in it, and there's not a privilege of it, or a power of it, or a purpose of it that you can't share. And your bedroom is up there waiting for you, and your plane is standing by your side.
- [on his fear of allowing Vietnam to fall into the hands of the Communists] Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me. 'Coward! Traitor! weakling!' They began throwing stones.
- It's hard to be a hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military.
- [on the Vietman War] If I left the woman I really loved - 'The Great Society' - in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. But if I let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as an appeaser.
- [to Eisenhower] I'm not going to drag you in to get any chestnuts out of the fire, unless I get my tail caught in a crack internationally. And when I do, I'm going to come running.
- [inviting Harry Truman to stay at he White House] I'll just send a plane for you and pick you up. You don't have to make any presentation. Don't have to raise any hell. We'll just go in there and have a drink or two together and then we'll go to church. I don't want to tax you. But I always wanted you to know I need your counsel, and I love you.
- [to aide Doris Kearns Goodwin] You know the great thing about Truman is that once he makes up his mind about something - anything, including the A-bomb - he never looks back and asks 'Should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?' No, he just knows he made up his mind as best he could and that's that. There's no going back. I wish I had some of that quality.
- [on Walter Cronkite who declared the Vietnam War was 'unwinnable'] I've just lost Middle America.
- Nixon has come along and everything I've worked for is ruined. I can just see him waking up in the morning, making that victory sign of his and deciding which program to kill. It's a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my 'Great Society' to death. Now her bones are beginning to stick out and her wrinkles are beginning to show. Soon she'll be so ugly that the American people will refuse to look at her; they'll stick her in a closet to hide her away and there she'll die. And when she dies, I, too, will die.
- Presidents are lonely people, and the only ones they are really sure of all the time are their womenfolk. President Nixon and I have something else in common. We can always depend on our womenfolk. Just as Mrs. Johnson has been by my side every step of the way, so has Mrs. Nixon.
- The difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.
- We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be dong for themselves.
- There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is only an American problem.
- [to University of Michigan graduates, May 1964] The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.. But that is just the beginning.
- [first presidential command, on Air Force One, November 22, 1963] Lets get this goddam thing airborne.
- If I became dictator of the world, I'd give all the poor on earth a cottage, and birth control pills - and I'd make damn sure they didn't get one if they didn't take the other.
- I once told Nixon that the presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hailstorm. You've got to just stand there and take it. That's what I'm doing now.
- The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young. My daddy was only sixty-two when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I'd never live through another four years. The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office.
- My God, I thought I knew just about everything involving Vietnam during my White House days. I discovered that I had missed a lot.
- I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.
- The damn press always accused me of things I didn't do. They never once found out about the things I did do.
- 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.
- On at least five occasions I personally vetoed military requests for retaliation bombing raids in the North. Only late in 1965 did I reluctantly agree to it. Not one of my principal advisers - Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and George Ball - opposed my decision not to rush into retaliation strikes. We had contingency plans to bomb in the North for retaliation for terrorist raids in the South. But I didn't want to do this. Finally, they attacked our base in Pleiku in February, 1965, destroying many planes and killing a lot of our men. I was forced to act. I felt I had no choice. All of my civilian advisers, every one of them, agreed with me. Dean Rusk told me, 'Mr. President, this is a momentous decision.' I suppose it was.
- [on the Vietnam War] We made a couple of key mistakes. To begin with, Kennedy should have had more than eighteen thousand military advisers there in the early 1960s. And then I made the situation worse by waiting eighteen months before putting more men in. By then, the war was almost lost. Another mistake was not instituting censorship - not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the other side from knowing what we were going to do next. My God, you can't fight a war by watching it every night on television. All the time, in 1964, I really hoped we could negotiate our way out of a major war in Vietnam. The Russians shared our hope. I told my advisers, 'By God, don't come to me with any plans to escalate this war unless you carry with you a joint congressional resolution.' I wasn't going to follow Truman's mistake in Korea when he went in without congressional approval. They claim I used Tonkin Gulf as an excuse. Hell, the Communists hit us there twice. The first time their torpedo boats hit the day before, I did nothing, hoping it was either a mistake or the action would not be repeated. But when they hit us again the very next day, I was forced to act. And just about every member of Congress was marching right along with me.
- [on resuming smoking in 1971] I'm an old man, so what's the difference? I always loved cigarettes and missed them every day since I quit. I don't want to linger the way Eisenhower did. When I go, I want to go fast.
- [on his chain smoking] No, I've raised you girls, I've been president, and now it's my time!
- I don't have ulcers. I give them!
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