Great Society Quotes

• The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Beauty, Children, Men

  The Great Society, delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

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• The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order.

  David Frum

  Self, Order, Law

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• A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

  Walter Lippmann

  Country, Intelligent, Thinking

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• We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Powerful, Moving, Opportunity

  Speech at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., 22 May 1964

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• The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Children, Knowledge, Mind

  The Great Society, delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

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• One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  War, Society, Vietnam

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• The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Men, Cities, House

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1966). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965”, p.240, Best Books on

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• I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Believe, Fighting, Vietnam

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1967). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966”, p.4, Best Books on

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• The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Men, Society, Quality

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  Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Inspirational, Leadership, Wisdom

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• Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Bars, Poverty, Offers

  The Great Society, delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

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• The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  War, Men, Cities

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1966). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965”, p.240, Best Books on

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• Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

  John Adams

  Party, Government, Unnecessary War

  John Adams (2016). “John Adams: Writings from the New Nation, 1784-1826”, p.814, Library of America

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• Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.

  Emile Durkheim

  Men, Society, Yoke

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.213, Routledge

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• The noblest search is the search for excellence.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Motivational, Success, Business

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• For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help - and God's.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Helping, Can Do, Asks

  Remarks Upon Arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. November 22, 1963.

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• This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  War, Unconditional Love, Poverty

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• A small grove massacred to the last ash,
  An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
  This great society is going to smash;
  They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
  How much they cost each other and the gods.
  A culture is no better than its woods.

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Giving, Environmental

  Shield of Achilles (1955) "Bucolics"

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• If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

  Fannie Lou Hamer

  Hate, Ifs

  The Worker, 13 July 1975

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• The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.

  Michele Bachmann

  Retirement, Different, Looks

  "CBS News/NJ debate transcript". National Journal debate on foreign policy and national security, www.cbsnews.com. November 13, 2011.

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• So here is the Great Society. It's the time - and it's going to be soon - when nobody in this country is poor.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Country, Economy, Poor

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• A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Education, Children, America

  The Great Society, delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

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• Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

  Learned Hand

  Tangled, May, Matter

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• There is One great society alone on earth: The noble living and the noble dead.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Noble, Earth

  The Prelude bk. 11, l. 393 (1850) See John Dewey 1; Hamer 1; Lyndon Johnson 5; Lyndon Johnson 6; Lyndon Johnson 8; Wallas 1

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• After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

  Martin Filler

  Political, Charity, Shelter

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