Harry S Truman

“The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”

“Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.”

“A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.”

“It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.”

“The buck stops here!”

“You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.”

“We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.”

“Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever apologize for anything.”

“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.”

“I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!”

“Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.”

“When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.”

“Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.”

“I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.”

“The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.”

“It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.”

“Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.”

“The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.”

“You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.”