Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes
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We have just lost the South for a generation.
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We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.
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I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded.
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We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences, that no one can perceive, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power, but we will not surrender and we will not retreat, for behind our American pledge lies the determination and resources, I believe, of all of the American nation.
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Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
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Therefore, I believe that we both have a heavy obligation to seek earnestly the path to peace. It is in response to that obligation that I am writing directly to you.
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It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
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Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes ... No law that we now have on the books ...can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.
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In the Civil Rights Act of 1965, we affirmed through law for every citizen in this land the most basic right of democracy-the right of a citizen to vote in an election in his country. In the five States where the Act had its greater impact, Negro voter registration has already more than doubled.
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What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.
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I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming-always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again-but always trying and always gaining.
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Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says, in Latin: 'God has favored our undertaking.' God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
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I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.
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As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too - a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people - so that those who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.
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And I just want to tell you this - we're in favor of a lot of things and we're against mighty few.
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Our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.
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I believe that we must always be mindful of this one thing, whatever the trials and the tests ahead. The ultimate strength of our country and our cause will lie not in powerful weapons or infinite resources or boundless wealth, but will lie in the unity of our people.
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They came here-the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.
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Of those to whom much is given, much is asked. I cannot say and no man could say that no more will be asked of us.
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Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.
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There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans - not as Democrats or Republicans-we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
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The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.
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We have tried over the past several years, in a variety of ways and through a number of channels, to convey to you and your colleagues our desire to achieve a peaceful settlement. For whatever reasons, these efforts have not achieved any results. . . .
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In 1957, as the leader of the majority in the United States Senate, speaking in support of legislation to guarantee the right of all men to vote, I said, 'This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.'