Harry S Truman Quotes
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An honest public servant can't become rich in politics. He can only attain greatness and satisfaction by service.
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Ignorance and its hand-maidens, prejudice, intolerance, suspicion of our fellowman, breed dictators and breed wars.
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Doing the right thing is easy. It is much more difficult to... figure out what the right thing is.
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I consider Monroe a pretty minor president. In spite of the Monroe Doctrine. That's the only important thing he ever did more or less on his own, when you really get down to it.
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For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy making arm of the government.
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We must build a new world, a far better world - one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.
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I have to decide Japanese strategy - shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I'll make it when I have all the facts.
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I'm the ultimately responsible person in this organization. Other people can pass the buck to me, but I can't pass the buck to anyone else.
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It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
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For reasons of national security and out of consideration for some people still alive I have omitted certain material. Some of this material cannot be made available for many years, perhaps for many generations.
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I have little patience with people who take the Bill of Rights for granted. The Bill of Rights, contained in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is every American's guarantee of freedom.
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Prosperous farmers make for a prosperous nation, and when farmers are in trouble, the nation is in trouble.
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There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.
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The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.
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I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
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In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers. Real security will be found only in law and in justice.
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I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.
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Some day we'll awake, have a reformation of the heart, teach our kids honor and kill a few sex psychologists, put boys in high schools with men teachers not sissies, close all the girls' finishing schools, shoot all the effeciency experts and become a nation of God's people once more.
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I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the begining of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it.
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I think there is an immense shortage of Christian charity among so-called Christians.
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Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.
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We have gone a long way toward civilization and religious tolerance, and we have a good example in this country. Here the many Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church do not seek to destroy one another in physical violence just because they do not interpret every verse of the Bible in exactly the same way. Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here.
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Term limits would cure both senility and seniority- both terrible legislative diseases.
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The fundamental basis of this Nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.