Lyndon B. Johnson War Quotations

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also require action.

We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it--to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.

Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.

I wake up 5 a.m. some mornings and hear the planes coming in at National Airport and I think they are bombing me.

We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.

We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.

In modern warfare there are no victors; there are only survivors.

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

If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations

Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.

We still seek no wider war.

Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war; we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

We Americans know - although others appear to forget - the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.