60+ Best Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Lyndon Baines Johnson, often referred to by the initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. Profoundly inspirational Lyndon B. Johnson quotes will brighten up your day and make you feel ready to take on anything.

If you’re searching for best quotes by presidents that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes by Calvin Coolidge, best Dwight D. Eisenhower quotes and greatest George W. Bush quotes.

Famous Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

The job, of course, will never be finished. For a nation, as for an individual, education is a perpetually unfinished journey, a continuing process of discovery.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right but to know what is right.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.

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.

No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by others, let them reflect how little they have contributed to the happiness of others.

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

A man without a vote is a man without protection.

I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

Peace is a journey of a thousand miles, and it must be taken one step at a time.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

Inspirational Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

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.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.

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

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hailstorm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don’t think anybody has held this job who hasn’t felt personally responsible for those being killed.

Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.

I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help – and God’s.

Freedom is not enough.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

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

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.

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 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.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

Top Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for a separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

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.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”— Lyndon B. Johnson

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.

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.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets, and the warships are all symbols of human failure.

There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general reconsideration.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

In our home, there was always prayer – aloud, proud, and unapologetic.

If we must disagree, let’s disagree without being disagreeable.

It’s the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done.

I’d rather give my life than be afraid to give it.

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.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’

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.

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.

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.

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

We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.