Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream Quotes

“How children dance,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “to the unlived lives of their parents,”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The experience of this campaign vindicated his belief that politics was essentially personal relations. In a twenty-minute appearance, he limited his speeches to five minutes so that he could spend the remaining fifteen minutes “touching” his audience. “A five-minute speech,” he later said, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen-minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Survey after survey reflected a widespread conviction that extremism was the cause of Kennedy’s death. It was to this sentiment that Johnson spoke in his peroration: “Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“For political leaders in a democracy are not revolutionaries or leaders of creative thought. The best of them are those who respond wisely to changes and movements already under way. The worst, the least successful, are those who respond badly or not at all, and those who misunderstand the direction of already visible change.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Kennedy’s death had unexpectedly brought fulfillment of his greatest ambition in circumstances that must have inspired awesome guilt and doubts.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Progressives (a combination of Midwestern”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Moreover, Johnson understood that the fewer the wants and needs of an individual, the less dependent he is on others. So his entrepreneurial spirit encompassed not simply the satisfaction of present needs but the development of new and expanding ones. He would, for instance, explain to a Senator that “although five other Senators are clamoring for this one remaining seat on the congressional delegation to Tokyo, I just might be able to swing it for you since I know how much you really want it.… It’ll be tough but let me see what I can do.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The politician, Johnson’s experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“morning I was at work in the Labor Department”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“I want,” freshman Senator Gale McGee wrote to Johnson, to take time to convey to you my deep personal appreciation for the committee assignments. Because of these appointments we freshmen have no alibis if by the end of this session we have failed to produce—in other days I suspect freshmen Senators have been able to excuse their early actions by the heavy hand of the old seniority system—but not now. Your action has given to us both individually and collectively both the responsibility and opportunity”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Johnson saw preoccupation with principle and procedure as a sign of impotence. Such men were “troublemakers,” more concerned with appearing forceful than in exercising the real strengths that led to tangible achievement.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“But when you run around saving your face all day, you end up losing your ass at night.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“These statements of belief are consonant with the assumption of pluralist thought that if people do not exclusively identify themselves with a single category—such as class, occupation, or system of belief—political cleavages will be limited in intensity.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The generation gap is just another way of saying that the younger generation makes overt what is covert in the older generation; the child expresses openly what the parent represses.”36 There was in the”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“How in the hell can that creepy guy be a hero to you?” Johnson asked me after we saw The Graduate in the movie theater on his ranch. “All I needed was to see ten minutes of that guy, floating like a big lump in a pool, moving like an elephant in that woman’s bed, riding up and down the California coast polluting the atmosphere, to know that I wouldn’t trust him for one minute with anything that really mattered to me. And if that’s an example of what love seems like to your generation, then we’re all in big trouble. All they did was to scream and yell at each other before getting to the altar. Then after it was over they sat on the bus like dumb mutes with absolutely nothing to say to one another.”35”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”10”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The American people,” Johnson continued, “are tired of wrecking crews. They want builders—people who construct. They will entrust their affairs to the party that is constructive. They will turn their backs on the party that is destructive.… If we go forward as positive Americans and not negative oppositionists I am convinced that the time is not too far distant when the Democratic Party will again be in the majority. The party that can produce a record of service to the people … the party that is the least partisan and the most patriotic … that party will win. A party that is overly partisan, overly quarrelsome and obsessed solely with politics will lose.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The American people,” Johnson continued, “are tired of wrecking crews. They want builders—people who construct. They will entrust their affairs to the party that is constructive.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“debate and decision. Congress itself was not, in his view, equipped with the expertise, the time, or the type of coherent organizational structure needed to formulate and initiate programs of action on a regular and systematically related basis. “Whenever my critics in the Congress talked to me about the responsibility of creating issues, I came back to the question of where in the hell they expected the issues to come from—from our heads? If an issue is not included in the presidential agenda, it is almost impossible—short of crisis—to get the Congress to focus on it. That’s the way our system works; but these fellows never understood that. They didn’t understand—with all their calls for Congress to have all sorts of expertise and classified information, in order to act in foreign affairs—that the congressional role in national security is not to act but to respond to the executive.”9”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“Nor did Johnson restrict his insistence on his concept of the proper relations between President and Congress to infringements proposed by liberal Democrats. In 1955 the conservative Republicans sponsored a resolution that would put the Senate on record against President Eisenhower’s participation in the Big Four summit meeting unless he first obtained a commitment from the Soviets to include the status of the Eastern European satellites as part of the agenda. “This resolution,” Johnson argued on the floor, “would make Congress the controlling factor instead of a partner in the field of foreign affairs. It would place a loaded gun at the President’s temple.… In our dealings with other nations, only one man can speak for our country. He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag. When he sits down to negotiate with the chiefs of foreign states, I want them to know he is backed to the hilt by every loyal American.”13”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The idea that the congressional Democrats have a responsibility for taking the national Democratic platform and program and trying to push it through the Congress is simply crazy. A political party at a national convention draws up a program to present to the voters. The voters can either accept it by giving the party full power, reject it by taking the party completely out of power, or give it qualified approval by giving one party the Congress and the other party the Presidency. And when we in the Congress have been given a qualified mandate, as we were in 1956, it means that we have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the President and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two. It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things.”10”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between the leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader. No man can compel another—except at knifepoint—to do what he does not want to do.”17”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“He sought the knowledge—not easily accessible—of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted. This”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The very qualities that had led to Johnson's political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him: his inward insistence that the world adapt itself to his goals; his faith in the nation's limitless capacity; his tendency to evaluate all human activity in terms of its political significance; his insistence on translating every disruptive situation into one where bargaining was possible; his reliance on personal touch; his ability to speak to each of his constituent groups on its own terms. All these gifts, instead of sustaining him, now conspired to destroy him.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“defiant of”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

“The biggest danger to American stability,” Johnson argued, “is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode. Thus it is for the sake of nothing less than stability that I consider myself a consensus man.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream