Harry S. Truman Quotes

1884 – 1972

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Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States (1945–53), an American politician of the Democratic Party. He served as a United States senator from Missouri (1935–45) and briefly as vice president (1945) before he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was president during the final months of World War II, making the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman was elected in his own right in 1948. He presided over an uncertain domestic scene as America sought its path after the war, and tensions with the Soviet Union increased, marking the start of the Cold War.

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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.

The people can never understand why the President does not use his powers to make them behave. Well all the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

My forebears were Confederates... but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

...I won't sell influence and I'm perfectly willing to be cussed if I'm right.

Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.

On March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress. In his eighteen-minute speech, he stated:

I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them ... that's all the powers of the President amount to.

How many times do you have to get hit over the head until you figure out who’s hitting you.

"some smart alecs of those days after World War I used to say: "The French fought for liberty, the British fought to control the seas, but the Americans fought for souvenirs.

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo... the country is perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have too many sane people.

It is important to the peace of the world to understand each other and have full faith in each other's sincerity. That is all we ask; that is all we want[...]

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

People who run for office and are defeated aren’t rejected in the usual sense of the word. They’re just defeated because they couldn’t get enough votes that one time. It doesn’t mean the public despises them. It’s a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that’s all. The examples I’ve given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln’s cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don’t become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don’t have any trouble.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

In bitter despair, some people have come to believe that wars are inevitable. With tragic fatalism, they insist that wars have always been, of necessity, and of necessity wars always will be. To such defeatism, men and women of good will must not and can not yield. The outlook for humanity is not so hopeless.