Quotes & Sayings About President Truman

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

Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them do what they are supposed to do anyway. Truman — David McCullough

As Truman saw the presidency, the chief responsibility was to make decisions and he made some of the most difficult and far-reaching of any president. If not brilliant or eloquent, he was courageous and principled. The invisible something he brought to the office was character. — David McCullough

First ladies are doing a lot. But the job remains undefined, frequently misunderstood, and subject to political attacks far nastier in some ways than those any President has ever faced. — Margaret Truman Daniel

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

[When her daughter suggested the President refer in his conversation with foreign dignitaries about lawn care to 'fertilizer' instead of to 'manure':] But remember, it took me almost thirty years to get him to call it manure. — Bess Truman

[President Truman] was free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job. — Dean Acheson

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

I would like to say that no man ever was given finer cooperation than that given me by President Truman. — Paul Hoffman

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

Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese. — Dorothy Day

All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's. — Conrad Black

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

Bipartisanship on behalf of an imprudent policy can be folly, just as partisanship on behalf of a just cause can be wise. What is clear is that politics will not stop at the water's edge simply because presidents plead for it. American foreign policy will return to the tradition of Truman and Vandenberg only when the American public demands it. — James M. Lindsay

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not "a member of the Caucasian race" and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do. — David McCullough

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

Dukakis. A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice. — Jeffrey Eugenides

A President cannot always be popular. — Harry Truman

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

Years later, the plain-speaking Truman would explain: "I fired him 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, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail. — Douglas Brinkley

Obama has been perhaps the most partisan President since Truman. He hasn't learned to be civil - note his insulting speech to Paul Ryan, who did us the courtesy of scoring a budget. The president has to talk to Republicans when it comes to the debt ceiling. He has reached the debt ceiling before anyone expected. — Grover Norquist

We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block. — John F. Kerry

I would say that President Roosevelt probably was more intimately in touch with the press corps at the White House than President Truman was. — Clifton Daniel

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 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

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

That was the principle of reparations to which President Truman agreed at Potsdam. And the United States will not agree to the taking from Germany of greater reparations than was provided by the Potsdam Agreement. — James F. Byrnes

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

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

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

Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war. — Robert Dallek

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

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

At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education. — Paul Hoffman

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The important thing is that the President be saved from his friends. Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. "Your friends will destroy you," Hassett pleaded. "It's all right, Bill," Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. "It's all right." Truman — David McCullough

Halina tries to picture the American president seated triumphantly behind his desk some 6,000 kilometers west of them. V-E Day, Truman called it: Victory in Europe. But to Halina, the word victory feels hollow. False, even. here's hardly anything victorious about the ruined Warsaw they left, or about the fact that so much of the family is still missing, or about how all around them in what was once Lodz's massive ghetto, they can feel the ghosts of 200,000 Jews - most of whom, it's rumored, met their deaths in the gas vans and chambers of Chelmno and Auschwitz. — David Foenkinos

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

Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him. — Rich Little

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

My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman. — James Costos

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

We support President Truman's civil rights program. — Eugenie Anderson

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

Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. "No, young man," said Truman, "I like to read myself awake." Thomas — David McCullough

In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history. — Stewart Udall

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

President Roosevelt proved that a President could serve for life. Truman proved that anyone could be elected. Eisenhower proved that your country can be run without a President. — Nikita Khrushchev

The 112th Congress passed only 220 laws, the lowest number enacted by any Congress. In 1948, when President Truman called the 80th Congress a 'Do-Nothing' Congress, it had passed more than 900 laws. — Juan Williams

Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers.
The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth
over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows. — Dan Brown

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

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

The very first thing the President [Truman] did was to show me the new Presidential Seal, which he had just redesigned. He explained, 'The seal has to go everywhere the President goes. It must be displayed upon the lectern when he speaks. The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re-designed it so that it now faces the olive branches ... what do you think?' I said, 'Mr. President, with the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle's neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.' — Winston Churchill

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

President Roosevelt and President Truman and President Eisenhower had the same experience, they all made the effort to get along with the Russians. But every time, finally it failed. And the reason it failed was because the Communists are determined to destroy us, and regardless of what hand of friendship we may hold out or what arguments we may put up, the only thing that will make that decisive difference is the strength of the United States. — John F. Kennedy

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

As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then. — Thomas Frank

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

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

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

Every President I think I've ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn't quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently. — Billy Graham

The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

To what level does your patriarchal blessing reach in your life? Can you recollect the time you received it and recover any of the spirit of the occasion? Do you in quiet moments ponder it? Does Karl G.Maeser's phrase, "paragraphs from the book of our possibilities" rest upon you with a sense of mission so that, as President Heber J.Grant exemplified, "you "dream nobly and manfully" and prepare ceaselessly? Do you ever think of Heber C.Kimball's faith that you can "write your own patriarchal blessing" under inspiration, for, saith the Lord, "No good thing will I withhold ... — Truman G. Madsen

President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I've always admired its philosophy. It read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I've envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can't explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can't run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can. — Leon Uris

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