Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

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

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

I believe in optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. But my hope is the people, the society, which is ahead of the government.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

Arts are a luxury, proof that a civilization has risen above 'politics and war.'

Pop music follows the evolution of society in general: Everything moves faster.

We think we can play a small part in the evolution of culture.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Youth is something very new: twenty years ago no one mentioned it.

If history tells us anything, it is that human culture and knowledge are constantly evolving.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

Simply put, no society can truly flourish if it stifles the dreams and productivity of half its population. Happily, I see evidence all over the world that women are gaining social and economic power that they never had before. This is good news.

Our idea of what constitutes social good has advanced with the procession of the ages, from those desperate times when just to keep body and soul together was an achievement, to the great present when "good" includes an agreeable, stable civilization accessible to all, the opportunity of each to develop his particular genius and the privilege of mutual usefulness.

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.