Quotes attributed to 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.

-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'll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.

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

-Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven't given up trying.

-Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that's the challenge.

-Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

-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.

-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.

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

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

-We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

-If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

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

-The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads . . . the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplaines. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.

-You aren't learning anything when you're talking.

-If we must disagree, let's disagree without being disagreeable.

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

-Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

-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.

-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.

-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.

-Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but

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

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

-Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement.

-'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.

-Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.

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

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

-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

-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.