Top 280 Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Short Quotes About Life, Positive Motivation Quotes, Future Quotes, Moving Forward Quotes

2. “Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that’s the challenge.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

3. “If you’re not listening, you’re not learning.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes, Quotes About Listening

4. “Nothing comes free. Nothing. Not even good, especially not good.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

5. “There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Teamwork Quotes

6. “Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

7. “Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Patriotic Quotes

8. “Come now. let us reason together.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

9. “Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

10. “Light at the end of the tunnel? We don’t even have a tunnel; we don’t even know where the tunnel is.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

11. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

12. “You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

13. “The noblest search is the search for excellence.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

14. “Voting is the first duty of democracy.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

15. “I’m gonna hunker down like a jack rabbit in a dust storm.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

16. “If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

17. “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

18. “Control of space means control of the world.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

19. “If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

20. “Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

21. “We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

22. “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems – the answer for all the problems of the world – come to a single word. That word is “education.””

— Lyndon B. Johnson

23. “I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

24. “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we’ll have to fight in San Francisco.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

25. “The best fertilizer for a piece of land is the footprints of its owner.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

26. “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

27. “Republicans simply don’t know how to manage the economy.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

28. “A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

29. “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

30. “Success only feeds the appetite of aggression.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

31. “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

32. “I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

33. “Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

34. “In a nation of millions and a world of billions, the individual is still the first and basic agent of change.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

35. “If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

36. “Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

37. “The test before us as a people is not whether our commitments match our will and our courage; but whether we have the will and courage to match our commitments.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

38. “The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources – because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

39. “I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

40. “The classroom – not the trench – is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

41. “We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

42. “For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

43. “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

44. “Life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met – obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

45. “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

46. “We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

47. “Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

48. “The family is the corner stone of our society.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

49. “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help – and God’s.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

50. “To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson