Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming—always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again—but always trying and always gaining.

I asked Congress to extend the supply management programs of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965, and I asked them to extend it this year. Chairman Poage tells me that his committee will give consideration to these recommendations shortly. We hope that with his assistance, and with Walter Mondale's assistance, with the help of all the Minnesota delegation, we can get permanent authority. The farmer should not be asked to grow more than the market can take at a fair price. I have asked the Congress to continue the direct payment programs of the 1965 act-they are the difference between profit and loss for many farmers each year. I have asked the Congress to extend the Food for Freedom Act for an additional 3 years--because it is right for this Nation, whose sons came from many nations, to try to help hungry people eat when we have an abundance--and because I think it is good business for our farmers to help build new markets for our products in other lands around the world. I have asked the Congress to authorize a National Food Bank--a security reserve for wheat, feed grains, soybeans--which would give the farmer higher prices, protect the consumer from food scarcities and shortages, and provide the Government with an emergency food "cushion" in reaching supply-management decisions so we would not get caught short when we had a bad estimate. I have asked the Congress to find the ways to give the farmer more bargaining power in the marketplace. Our working people and our good laboring friends in this country have not met all their needs or their desires. They still have many objectives and goals that we want to help them reach. But the reason the farmer's income does not compare favorably with a laboring man's income is one reason, primarily, in my judgment: Labor has bargaining power; the farmer has none. If you are to continue to pay the prices that industry charges and sets, if you are to continue to pay the wages that American workers are entitled to get, you are going to have to be put on an equal basis with industry and labor in bargaining power. As you have so many times in the past, the Farmers Union has joined with us to help us to work, strive, and fight in order to get bargaining power for the American farmer. Finally, I have asked the Congress for the programs to bring parity of opportunity to the rural children in America; to give them better elementary education; to give them better library facilities; to give them better transportation; to give us better farm credit; to give us more rural jobs; to give us decent housing; to give us adequate diets, with adequate consumer protection for the housewives; to give us the chance to lead a full and productive life.

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, "Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please." You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result.

We are called to honor our own words of reverent prayer with resolution in the deeds we must perform to preserve peace and the hope of freedom. We keep a vigil of peace around the world. Until the world knows no aggressors, until the arms of tyranny have been laid down, until freedom has risen up in every land, we shall maintain our vigil to make sure our sons who died on foreign fields shall not have died in vain.

From this chamber of representative government, let all the world know and none misunderstand that I rededicate this Government to the unswerving support of the United Nations, to the honorable and determined execution of our commitments to our allies, to the maintenance of military strength second to none, to the defense of the strength and the stability of the dollar, to the expansion of our foreign trade, to the reinforcement of our programs of mutual assistance and cooperation in Asia and Africa, and to our Alliance for Progress in this hemisphere.

But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.

I have traveled a long way from this college to the office that I now occupy. In few times, yes, in very few nations, in man's journey has it been possible for any man to travel such a road. In Washington I am surrounded by men who have come from every walk of life to the most responsible posts of government. For that is what your government really is. It is not a strange and alien power in a remote and menacing city. It is a banker from New York and a druggist from Minnesota, the son of a tenant farmer from Texas. Some day it may very well be some of you. America has succeeded more than any other nation in the world in making it possible for a man to achieve whatever his ability would allow. The idea that man's only limitation would be his talent and intelligence, and his willingness to work, has been at the heart of the American dream, and for some of us it has come true.

In the Civil Rights Act of 1965, we affirmed through law for every citizen in this land the most basic right of democracy—the right of a citizen to vote in an election in his country. In the five States where the Act had its greater impact, Negro voter registration has already more than doubled.

In the world, America stands for — and works for — the right of all men to govern themselves through free, uninhibited elections. An ink bottle broken against an American Embassy, a fire set in an American library, an insult committed against our American flag, anywhere in the world, does far less injury to our country and our cause than the discriminatory denial of the right of any American citizen at home to vote on the basis of race or color.

Tonight we offer ourselves--on our record and by our platform--as a party for all Americans, an all-American party for all Americans. This prosperous people, this land of reasonable men, has no place for petty partisanship or peevish prejudice. The needs of all can never be met by parties of the few. The needs of all cannot be met by a business party or a labor party, not by a war party or a peace party, not by a southern party or a northern party. Our deeds will meet our needs only if we are served by a party which serves all our people. We are members together of such a party, the Democratic Party of 1964. We have written a proud record of accomplishments for all Americans.

Second, through a new Community Action program we intend to strike at poverty at its source--in the streets of our cities and on the farms of our countryside among the very young and the impoverished old. This program asks men and women throughout the country to prepare long-range plans for the attack on poverty in their own local communities. These are not plans prepared in Washington and imposed upon hundreds of different situations. They are based on the fact that local citizens best understand their own problems, and know best how to deal with those problems. These plans will be local plans striking at the many untilled needs which underlie poverty in each community, not just one or two. Their components and emphasis will differ as needs differ. These plans will be local plans calling upon all the resources available to the community-federal and state, local and private, human and material. And when these plans are approved by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal government will finance up to 9070 of the additional cost for the first two years. The most enduring strength of our nation is the huge reservoir of talent, initiative and leadership which exists at every level of our society. Through the Community Action Program we call upon this, our greatest strength, to overcome our greatest weakness.

The purpose of the law is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. It does not give special treatment to any citizen. It does say the only limit to a man's hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own ability. It does say that there are those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.

We meet in grief, but let us also meet in renewed dedication and renewed vigor. Let us meet in action, in tolerance, and in mutual understanding. John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed-that America must move forward. The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation's bloodstream.

So I say today: the times are good. Our prospects are bright. Your Nation's strength is great. The promise before us all is bright. But one fact stands out above all the rest. What we have, what you have accumulated, what all American families hope to accumulate can be lost if we do not continue on the course of perfecting our unity. Our prosperity today is not a one-time phenomenon. This is a solid, stable, steady prosperity--achieved by the confidence and the certainty of a climate that's free of doubt and division and bitter contention. Our dollar is strong because the world has new confidence in our responsibility. Our consumer market is strong because Americans at home have confidence in our future course. Our enterprise system is functioning successfully because we have been doing here in Washington many of the things so long needed to lift off burdens of the past. Taxes have been cut. Spending has been curbed. Earnest and honest efforts have been made to put to work in Government today's new tools and new concepts to produce more efficient management of your public business.