Harry S. Truman

If you can't beat 'em, confuse 'em.

Canada and the United States have reached the point where we no longer think of each other as 'foreign' countries. We think of each other as friends, as peaceful and cooperative neighbors on a spacious and fruitful continent.

The most peaceful thing in the world is plowing a field. Chances are you’ll do your best thinking that way.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

The most peaceful thing in the world is plowing a field. Chances are you’ll do your best thinking that way. And that’s why I’ve always thought and said, farmers are the smartest people in the world, they don’t go for high hats and they can spot a phony a mile off.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.

I come to the office each morning and stay for long hours doing what has to be done to the best of my ability. And when you've done the best you can, you can't do any better.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

Whenever you put a man on the Supreme Court he ceases to be your friend.

Well, I wouldn't say that I was in the great class, but I had a great time while I was trying to be great.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.

This administration is going to be cussed and discussed for years to come.

A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.

If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.

You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!

The President is always abused. If he isn't, he isn't doing anything.

It's plain hokum. If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em. It's an old political trick. But this time it won't work.