Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause. At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

Franklin Roosevelt talked about the one-third that were ill clad and ill fed and ill housed. After working 30 years with your help and your crusades and your radical editorials and all of those things, we have it down to one-fifth, but we still have got 20 percent, 1 out of every 5, that are in the poverty group. Twenty years ago, 5 percent over a 10-year period, coming out from 1942 to 1952, and from 1952 to 1962 it was 3 percent, and now it is 1 percent that is coming out--1 percent a year. From 1937 to 1947 it was 5 percent, 1947 to 1953 it was 3 percent, 1953 to 1963 it is 1 percent. Now it is getting a lot more difficult in this IBM age for those people that have no training, that live on the other side of the tracks--it is getting a lot more difficult for them to get out and cross the tracks and get out of that poverty classification. You have to help them by this poverty program that will provide them with training. Forty-nine percent--1 out of every 2 boys we draft has to be sent home because he is physically or mentally unqualified. That is the kind of folks you are raising. If I had to do that with my calves, I would go broke every year. If I out of every 2 of my calves was born and I had to have rejects, I couldn't make it. So we begin this poverty war from a position of unmatched prosperity, with national abundance. We have just concluded the most productive and prosperous quarter on record. I had the figures here a minute ago. I wanted to give them to you.

We are going ahead with our determined effort to bring peace to this world. We are going ahead in our country to bring an end to poverty and to racial injustice. In the last 10 minutes we have made considerable progress when we voted cloture in the Senate today by a vote of 71 to 29. The message of Pope John and John Kennedy flowed from the message that burst upon the world 2,000 years ago--a message of hope and redemption not for a people or for a nation, but hope and redemption for all people of all nations. We now can join knowledge to faith and science to belief to realize in our time the ancient hope of a world which is a fit home for mail. The New Testament enjoins us to "Go ye therefore and teach all nations." Go forth then--in that spirit--to put your hands in the service of man and to put your hearts in the service of God.

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 Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of Defense must continue to receive the best professional military advice available to the leaders of any government in the world. The importance of a strong line of command running from the Commander-in-Chief to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Unified and Specified Commanders in the field has been repeatedly demonstrated during recent years. The Secretary of Defense will present to you certain recommendations to strengthen the Joint Staff.

Our war on poverty, an unconditional declaration of war against one of the last bitter enemies of a great society, can be traced, I think, in large part to the courage and the compassion and the commitment of the Peace Corps volunteers. Because, by fighting hunger, illiteracy, and poverty abroad, you have shown us that we can and we should and we must fight them at home. So I expect returning Peace Corps volunteers to play a major role in this war on poverty. We need your experience. We need your sense of duty. We need your imagination if we are to win this war. And win it we must.

Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

The first area of this increasing strength is our ability to deter atomic destruction. In the past 3 years we have increased our nuclear power on alert 2½ times, and our nuclear superiority will continue to grow until we reach agreement on arms control. We have now more than 1,000 fully armed ICBM's and Polaris missiles ready for retaliation. The Soviet Union has far fewer, and none ready to be launched beneath the seas. We have more than 1,100 strategic bombers, many of which are equipped with air-to-surface and decoy missiles to help them reach almost any target. The Soviet Union, we estimate, could with difficulty send less than one-third of this number over targets in the United States. Against such force the combined destructive power of every battle ever fought by man is like a firecracker thrown against the sun.

Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime—and mine.

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

We will serve all the Nation, not one section or one sector, or one group, but all Americans. These are the United States-a united people with a united purpose. Our American unity does not depend upon unanimity. We have differences; but now, as in the past, we can derive from those differences strength, not weakness, wisdom, not despair. Both as a people and a government, we can unite upon a program, a program which is wise and just, enlightened and constructive.

A second field of danger and opportunity is in our confrontation with Russia and Communist China. Today there is no longer one cold war; there are many. They differ in temperature, intensity, and danger. Our relations with the Soviet Union have come a long way since shoes were banged on desks here in New York and a summit meeting collapsed in Paris. In Asia there is a different prospect. The final outcome will depend on the will of the Asian people. But as long as they turn to us for help, we will be there. We will not and we must not permit the great civilizations of the East--almost half of the people of all the world--to be swallowed up in Communist conquest. In Viet-Nam we believe that, with our help, the people of South Viet-Nam can defeat Communist aggression. We will continue to act on this belief without recklessness and without retreat.

So you are going to have to be the crusaders that lead the parade and you are going to have to be the ones that get us at least a few Republican votes on our poverty bill that is pending up here. We don't want a Democratic bill; we don't want a Republican bill. We want an American bill, for all Americans who are in this lower group, so we can help train those people that are being rejected, so we can help prepare those people who head families that are not equipped to do anything, and I would like to have your help in awakening the conscience and the concern of all Americans who can be aroused to go to work for their fellowman. I want your help to enlist an army of Americans of every party and every region in this war. Let this be said: That the real war to end all wars must be the war to eliminate poverty. Let this be known as a generation of Americans who made it their personal duty to give every American an equal and fair chance.

Make no mistake about it. I don't want a man in here to go back home thinking otherwise; we are going to win.

I have come here to thank personally each Member of the Congress who labored so long and so valiantly to make this occasion come true today, and to make this bill a reality. I cannot mention all their names, for it would take much too long, but my gratitude; and that of this Nation; belongs to the 89th Congress. We are indebted, too, to the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to the support given to this measure by the then Attorney General and now Senator, Robert F. Kennedy. In the final days of consideration, this bill had no more able champion than the present Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, who, with New York's own "Manny" Celler, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Congressman Feighan of Ohio, and Senator Mansfield and Senator Dirksen constituting the leadership of the Senate, and Senator Javits, helped to guide this bill to passage, along with the help of the Members sitting in front of me today.