Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

But we look back now, and we realize the Great Society was not a success.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.

The great society.

We’ve got to get out of Vietnam or else we have to educate the people as to why we are in there.

The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world.

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

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

Bend everything toward improving the standard of living of the people.

The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control.

[On the Vietnam War:] I leave all morality up to you clergymen.

If we can spend over $3 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, surely we can find the money to meet the long-term needs of our people.

I dream ...of a world where we can commit our social resources to the development of human life and not to its destruction

Liberals measure compassion by counting the number of people receiving government help.

What my bill would do would be only for refugees going forward. So I haven't taken a position on sending anyone home. But I have taken the position that we have a lot of problems here in our country. And that one of the things that we do - charity is about giving your own money. Charity isn't giving someone else's money.

The UN is committed to the goal of ensuring that all nations share in economic, social, & scientific progress. It delivers humanitarian assistance to the victims of wars and natural disasters.

I think we fought Vietnam for the benefits of civilization, and certainly we fought it to oppose authority. To show our authority, to show we weren't weak. Isn't that what Nixon kept saying? "We have to show the world that we're not weak." So of course what we ended up showing the world was that we were, yep, weak. 'Cause we couldn't beat these kids in black pajamas.

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

The issue should not be, we're going to tax you more to give you the services you want. The issue is, this is the wealthiest country in the world, and we're going to use that wealth to service human needs and not to service a military industrial corporate surveillance state.

We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.