Harry S. Truman Quotes

We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are.

Actions are the seeds of fate. Deeds grow into destiny.

We are in a troublesome period, and some "nonsense" as you term it — but this is a great nation with a high purpose, and we shall come to our senses and resume our course.

It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.

He was a windbag. He made a great many orations, and I imagine he did a very good job, but he was still a windbag

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.

[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.

I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading,

In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. [...] Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.

The buck stops here!

All Fascism did not die with Mussolini. Hitler is finished — but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains. It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength.

The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in our country's efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to insure that all Americans enjoy these rights. When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.