Lady Bird Johnson Quotes

“Things are not going well here….Vietnam is getting worse by the day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with great disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.”
― Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

“I’ll never forgive Lyndon’s boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project,” she later recalled. “But I went ahead and talked about wildflowers so as not to scare anybody, because I knew if the people came to love wildflowers they’d have to eventually care about the land that grew ’em.”
― Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

“They feel that if I have any kind of life at all, I am going to enjoy it as best I can because I may not be here tomorrow. This is what the youth of America is crying today. They also feel that if my education is going to only bring me a diploma, that I will not even have a job waiting for me afterwards, why should I even try to get a diploma? There are boys now that I know across this nation who feel it does not pay to be a good guy today, “Why should I be a good guy? If I am a bad guy, I get thrown in jail and I have a record or the Government is going to take care of me.”
― Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

“And sometimes I think the greatest courage in the world is to get up in the morning and go about a day’s work. That is one of the things I like about him. He keeps on and on and on. —Lady Bird Johnson, White House diary, August 27, 1968”
― Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

“that he has even a little hope of controlling. I know that it is a racking year for Lyndon physically, and it must be mentally and spiritually. And sometimes I think the greatest courage in the world is to get up in the morning and go about a day’s work. That is one of the things I like about him. He keeps on and on and on.”
― Julia Sweig, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight