- [his journal entry after visiting Berlin shortly after VE Day.] Never have I seen such a sorrowful sight. I hope for a swift end to this war but I fear that the machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.
- I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
- A president cannot always be popular.
- Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.
- I don't want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me. Find the strongest and most able and God bless you. Good-bye.
- Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.
- [on James Stewart] If Bess and I had a son, we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart.
- [on criticism] He who cannot stand the heat should stay out of the kitchen.
- [on father/mother] Since a child at my mother's knee, I have believed in honor, ethics, and right living for its own reward.
- Whenever a fellow tells me he's bipartisan. I know he's going to vote against me.
- [to a friend, the day after FDR died] I'm not big enough. I'm not big enough for this job.
- [on in-coming President Eisenhower] This fellow don't know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.
- It's interesting that a single thing, that great smile of Eisenhower's, gave him the worldwide and lifelong reputation of being a sunny and amiable man., when most of us who knew him well were all too aware that he was essentially a surly, angry and disagreeable man.
- Most Presidents don't seem to want to talk to former presidents. And from my experience, I know that's pretty natural behavior. A new president wants to be president on his own hook, and not have a former president around, trying to give him advice. But the really terrible thing is when a president sets out to actively discredit the politics of a former president. And that's what happened when I was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower.
- [jokingly to Eisenhower who had asked before they toured the White House whether he should sign the guestbook] Definitely. Then if anything is missing we'll know who to blame.
- [on unexpectedly becoming President in 1945] I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.
- [on Douglas MacArthur] I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son-of-a-bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
- My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
- I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead ten or fifteen years.
- Don't see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons and MacArthurs.
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