President Harry Truman Quotes & Sayings

One of the presidents we could have done without ... There are some things I admire about Tyler, but there were also plenty of things that weren't so admirable ... The reason I have a certain amount of grudging respect for John Tyler is that he knew his own mind and stuck to his decisions. — Harry S. Truman

The President is always abused. If he isn't, he isn't doing anything. — Harry S. Truman

Some of the presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that. — Harry S. Truman

I'll come back to George Washington just long enough to say goodbye to him. He was a great man and a good man, and when his work was over as our great first president, he went back home to Virginia for his long-earned rest. Just three years later, on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he went to his final rest. As — Harry Truman

I would rather have peace in the world than be President. — Harry S. Truman

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States. — Harry S. Truman

I enjoyed my new position as vice president, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for 10 years as a senator. — Harry S. Truman

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it. — Harry S. Truman

The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him his is not. — Harry S. Truman

Hi Allan, it's Harry'
'Which Harry?'
'Truman, Allan. Harry S. Truman, the president, damn it!'
'How nice! That was a good meal we had Mr President, thank you. I hope you weren't required to fly the plane home? — Jonas Jonasson

It sure is hell to be president. — Harry S. Truman

A President cannot always be popular. — Harry Truman

I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to. — Harry S. Truman

No one who has not had the responsibility can really understand what it is like to be President, not even his closest aides or members of his immediate family. There is no end to the chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President. — Harry S. Truman

If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house. — Harry S. Truman

A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment. — Harry S. Truman

The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive "inside" books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so. For — David McCullough

My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman. — Jimmy Carter

Hungry Jack's real name was Charles R. Hoofard.
He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.
In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.
Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.
In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.
History is full of shit like that. — Andrew Smith

I consider Monroe a pretty minor president. In spite of the Monroe Doctrine. That's the only important thing he ever did more or less on his own, when you really get down to it. — Harry S. Truman

I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was. — Harry Truman

Being President is a little bit like riding a tiger. You have to keep riding, or else you will be swallowed up by it! — Harry S. Truman

Mrs. Roosevelt seemed calm in her characteristic, graceful dignity. She stepped forward and placed her arm gently about my shoulder. "Harry," she said quietly, "the President is dead." For a moment, I could not bring myself to speak. The last news we had had from Warm Springs was that Mr. Roosevelt was recuperating nicely. In fact, he was apparently doing so well that no member of his immediate family, and not even his personal physician, was with him. All this flashed through my mind before I found my voice. "Is there anything I can do for you?" I asked at last. I shall never forget her deeply understanding reply. "Is there anything we can do for you?" she asked. "For you are the one in trouble now. — Harry Truman

Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed. — Harry S. Truman

In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity. — Harry S. Truman

When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency. — Harry S. Truman

The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's. — Harry S. Truman

Harry Truman once said, 'There are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of the other people - the 150 or 160 million - is the responsibility of the president of the United States, and I propose to fulfill it.' — John F. Kennedy

The legislative job of the President is especially important to the people who have no special representatives to plead their cause before Congressand that includes the great majority. I sometimes express it by saying the President is the only lobbyist that one hundred and fifty million Americans have. The other twenty million are able to employ people to represent themand thats all right, its the exercise of the right of petitionbut someone has to look after the interests of the one hundred and fifty million that are left. — Harry S. Truman

It's tougher to be a football coach than the President of the United States. You've got four years as a president, and they guard you. A football coach doesn't have anyone to protect him when things go wrong. — Harry S. Truman

President Harry S. Truman is said to have famously asked for a one-handed economist, noting that "all my economists say, on the one hand and on the other. — Greg Ip

I don't feel qualified to be president either, but I've got the job. — Harry S. Truman

I tend to pair up Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower because they're the two presidents I can think of who most preferred laziness to labor ... There's not much else you can say about Harrison except that he was president of the United States. — Harry S. Truman

He was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn't the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with ... Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader. — Harry S. Truman

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past. — Harry S. Truman

Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel. — Dick Durbin

The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other. There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause. — Nancy Gibbs

Within the first few months I discovered that being President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed. — Harry Truman