Great Society Quotes

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for and President Kennedy died for.

No society has ever been great that didn't honor and foster learning.

Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.

The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.

You remind me of Hubert Humphrey. You talk too much

The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear.

War might be instantly banished from Europe, would its nations regard themselves as one great society, and by mutual consent, erect a court for the trial and decisions of their respective disputes.

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

Lyndon Johnson was eleven of the most interesting people I ever met

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.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

The great society.

I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy's magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.

A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

I would've loved Jack Kennedy. I would've loved to have campaigned for him and supported him. I wish there were more like him today.

I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born and I am honored to be apart of something that focuses on working class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Kennedy have done so much in that regard for the two generations they've won over during their career course.

I am privileged to be a citizen of the single greatest society in all of human history.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

The Vietnam War soured President Johnson's legacy. We still have to recognize his domestic legacy.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.