Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
Lyndon B. Johnson
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'
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.
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
You aren't learning anything when you're talking.
Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.
There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
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.
Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.
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.
I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.
When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.
We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
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.
Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right.
We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.
Freedom is not enough.
A man without a vote is man without protection.
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.
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass.
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.
We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.
The noblest search is the search for excellence.
We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.
Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.
I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.
No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.
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.
A President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.
John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.
This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.
The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.
What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.
There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.
The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.
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.
It is important that the United States remain a two-party system. I'm a fellow who likes small parties and the Republican Party can't be too small to suit me.
We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.
I'd rather give my life than be afraid to give it.
It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.
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.
The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.
