Lies and mud make “news” – the truth and flowers do not.
– Harry Truman
If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.
– Harry Truman
Leadership is the art of getting other people to run with your idea as if it were their own.
– Harry Truman
Men make history. History does not make men.
– Harry Truman
I have always defined politics to mean the science of govenment, perhaps the most
important science, because it involves the art and ability of people to live together.
– Harry Truman
Since a child at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics, and right living as its own
reward.
– Harry Truman
I am sorry to see a growth of snobbery in the United States in recent years. I especially
deplore the tendency to look down on people who work with their hands.
– Harry Truman
Happiness is a state of mind. A farmhand, if he has an ample living, can be just as happy as a
millionaire with homes in Maine and Florida.
– Harry Truman
When a man gets the right kind of wife, his career is made – and I just got that.
– Harry Truman
It only takes one nation to make war. But it takes two or more to make a peace.
– Harry Truman
I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus
Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in the land of Israel? Where would the Reformation
have gone if Martin Luther had taken a poll?
– Harry Truman
I have had all of Washington that I want.
– Harry Truman
I’ve never really believed in capital punishment. I commuted the sentence of the fellow who
was trying to shoot me to life imprisonment. That’s the best example I can give you.
– Harry Truman
I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make.
– Harry Truman
We must never forget that prosperity for other people means prosperity for us and prosperity
for us means prosperity for other people.
– Harry Truman
Do your best, history will do the rest.
– Harry Truman
It’s been my policy to do every job assigned to me just a little better than anyone else has
done it.
– Harry Truman
When you read what the press had to say about Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and the
other presidents, you would think that we never had a decent man in the office since the
country began.
– Harry Truman
Tact is the ability to step on a man’s toes without messing up the shine on his shoes.
– Harry Truman
If we do not abolish war on this earth, then surely one day, war will abolish us from the
earth.
– Harry Truman
There are probably hundreds of people better qualified than I am to be president, but
they weren’t elected.
– Harry Truman
Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps the most idiotic of
human stupidities.
– Harry Truman
The United States was created by the boys and girls who could not get along at home.
– Harry Truman
I can always get along with an honest man.
– Harry Truman
If you tell Congress everything about the world situation, they get hysterical. If you tell them
nothing, they go fishing.
– Harry Truman
If there is one basic element in our constitution, it is civilian control of the military. Politics are
to be made by the elected political officials, not by generals or admirals.
– Harry Truman
I have found that the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want,
and then advise them to do it.
– Harry Truman
Men often mistake notoriety for fame, and would rather be remarked for their vices and follies
than not be noticed at all.
– Harry Truman
It’s not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It’s the hand that
casts the ballot.
– Harry Truman
It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.
– Harry Truman
America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable
determination to do the job at hand.
– Harry Truman
All my life I’ve been relatively free from worry, and maybe that’s the best formula for long life.
– Harry Truman
Education is one thing that can’t be taken away from you. Nobody can rob you of your
education, because that is in your head; that is, if you have any head and are capable of
holding it.
– Harry Truman
In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over
themselves and their carnal urges. Self-discipline with all of them came first.
– Harry Truman
I would much rather be an honorable public servant and known as such than to be the
richest man in the world.
– Harry Truman
I’ve got other things to do besides watch television.
– Harry Truman
I’ve always believed that religion is something to live by and not to talk about it.
– Harry Truman
After you are fifty years old, walking is the best exercise you can take. Of course, some
aging exhibitionists try to prove that they can play tennis or handball or anything else they
did when they were eighteen. And every once in a while one of them falls dead of a heart
attack. I say that’s not for me.
– Harry Truman
There is no difference in totalitarian states, call them Nazi, fascist, or communist – they are
all the same.
– Harry Truman
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
– Harry Truman
The acts of stupidity through the ages did us a kind of unintentional favor – by driving so
many different kinds of good people to our shores and merging them together as Americans.
– Harry Truman
I don’t like bipartisans. Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote
against me.
– Harry Truman
Keep working on a plan. Make no little plans. Make the biggest one you can think of, and
spend the rest of your life carrying it out.
– Harry Truman
There is a lure for power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money
have been known to do.
– Harry Truman
The Indians didn’t understand the approach of the white man in business dealings, and they
got cheated every time they got into a trade with the white man.
– Harry Truman
The objective of the press is to sell papers and advertising, and you should always keep that
in mind.
– Harry Truman
I have never seen pessimists make anything work, or contribute anything of lasting value.
– Harry Truman
Never use two words when one will do best.
– Harry Truman
Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.
– Harry Truman
If you don’t like people, you hadn’t ought to be in politics at all.
– Harry Truman
A man who is influenced by the polls or is afraid to make decisions which may make him
unpopular is not a man to represent the welfare of the country.
– Harry Truman
I never take a problem to bed with me at night. When I’ve made a decision, I know it’s the
best decision I can make under the circumstances and I stop worrying about it.
– Harry Truman
A man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any other.
– Harry Truman
I never sit on a fence. I am either on one side or another.
– Harry Truman
It is true that I did not always react pleasantly to criticism – or derisive comments – but
I never for a moment questioned the right of anyone to do so.
– Harry Truman
Children nowadays have too many gadgets to fool with and not enough chores.
– Harry Truman
I am inclined to attribute my good health, and that of my family, primarily to our outlook
on life, and to our philosophical approach to other people and to ourselves.
– Harry Truman
No nation on this globe should be more internationally minded than America because it
was built by all nations.
– Harry Truman
To be president of the United States is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great
decisions.
– Harry Truman
The Russians are tough bargainers and always ask for the whole earth, expecting maybe
to get an acre.
– Harry Truman
Everybody has a right to express what he thinks. That, of course, lets the crackpots in. But if
you cannot tell a crackpot when you see one, then you ought to be taken in.
– Harry Truman
I have always been opposed even to the thought of fighting a “preventive war.” There is
nothing more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don’t “prevent”
anything by war except peace.
– Harry Truman
I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tomstone, Arizona. It says: “Here
lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.” I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can
have.
– Harry Truman
Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.
– Harry Truman
The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the
president. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange
activities.
– Harry Truman
You can’t be mentally fit unless you’re physically fit.
– Harry Truman
Our tribal instinct has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals,
haven’t caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?
– Harry Truman
Those who resorted to wars to inflict their kind of Christianity upon other faiths or
denominations did not really understand Christianity.
– Harry Truman
There are more prima donnas per square foot in public life here in Washington than in all the
opera companies ever to exist.
– Harry Truman
I’d rather have lasting peace in the world than be president. I wish for peace, I work for
peace, and I pray for peace continually.
– Harry Truman
Politics – good politics – is public service. There is no life or occupation in which a man can
find a greater opportunity to serve his community or country.
– Harry Truman
I don’t like divorces because I think that when you make a contract, you should keep it. The
marriage contract is one of the most sacred in the world.
– Harry Truman
Wherever you find a crooked politician, you’ll find a crooked businessman behind him.
– Harry Truman
I’m not a scholar. I know I read the wrong books, but I read a lot, and I suppose I got some
good ones now and then.
– Harry Truman
It was the same with those old birds in Greece and Rome as it is now. The only thing new is
the history you don’t know.
– Harry Truman
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
– Harry Truman