Lyndon B. Johnson

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.

It is happily and kindly provided that in every life there are certain pauses, and interruptions, which force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light, points of time where one course of action ends and another begins.

I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.

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

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

For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

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.

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.

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.

I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for.

I don't have any handicap. I am all handicap.

The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

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.

When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

...in the decline of life shame and grief are of short duration; whether it be that we bear easily what we have borne long; or that, finding ourselves in age less regarded, we less regard others; or, that we look with slight regard upon afflictions to which we know that the hand of death is about to put an end.

Every funeral may justly be considered as a summons to prepare for that state into which it shows us that we must some time enter; and the summons is more loud and piercing as the event of which it warns us is at less distance. To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; but to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.

What we won when all of our people united just must not now be lost in suspicion, distrust, selfishness, and politics among any of our people. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.

I am afraid, ... that health begins, after seventy, and often long before, to have a meaning different from that which it had at thirty. But it is culpable to murmur at the established order of the creation, as it is vain to oppose it. He that lives, must grow old; and he that would rather grow old than die, has God to thank for the infirmities of old age.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name.