Famous Truman Quotes

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.

I knew damn well I would never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you are intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try and get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego, tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule and someday I'll try to get around to it.

My complexes aren´t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and some day I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.

I don’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and someday I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,' Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities?

President Truman famously asked for a “one-armed economist” who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, “On the other hand …

President Harry S. Truman is said to have famously asked for a one-handed economist, noting that “all my economists say, on the one hand and on the other.

When I've found does the most good is just to get into taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a reallife place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it. President Truman famously asked for a “one-armed economist” who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, “On the other hand…

he said anybody who voted for his bitter enemy Richard Nixon “ought to go to hell.” John Kennedy was asked about the comment in one of his famous televised debates with Nixon. “Well,” he said, “I must say that Mr. Truman has his methods of expressing things…. I really don’t think there’s anything I can say to President Truman that’s going to cause him at the age of seventy-six to change his particular speaking manner. Maybe Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.

Benny spent maybe thousands sending her to head-shrinkers. Even the famous one, the one can only speak German, boy, did he throw in the towel. You can’t talk her out of these”—he made a fist, as though to crush an intangible—“ideas. Try it sometime. Get her to tell you some of the stuff she believes. Mind you,” he said, “I like the kid. Everybody does, but there’s lots that don’t. I do. I sincerely like the kid. I’m sensitive, that’s why. You’ve got to be sensitive to appreciate her: a streak of the poet.

I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it’s essential not to have any ego at all. I don’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and someday I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.

Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters.

To his eternal delight, the Chicago Daily Tribune printed its front page before the polls had closed, with the blazing headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In one of the most famous photographs in American political history, a beaming Truman holds up the paper in triumph. He had reason to rejoice: Not only had he won a miraculous political victory, but the Democrats had retaken both houses of Congress. The Republican reign on Capitol Hill was over after two short years, and the Democrats reasserted their longstanding dominance in Washington.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

Truman seethed. “I put it to you,” he railed during a campaign stop in Indianapolis during his famous come-from-behind reelection campaign in 1948. “Is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity!

Not campy bad, or interesting bad, but boring bad.

She was sometimes called “the female Arthur Godfrey,” combining a down-home charm with a keen and astute interviewing style. Her voice was “girlish, hesitant, often bewildered,” in the opinion of Life magazine. Her stock in trade was innocence: “she preserved the air of a little girl lost in the big city,” but managed to draw from the rich and famous revealing anecdotes and warm insights. She interviewed more than 1,200 people, from Sally Rand and Harry Truman to the Grand Lama of Tibet. Mary Margaret McBride was born in 1899, and she came to radio after a career in letters. She wrote several books in the 1920s and was one of the country’s best-paid article writers until the Depression arrived and demolished her markets.

Anyone who mistook Harry Truman for a pint-sized [famously segregationist Mississippi senator Theodore] Bilbo was making a big mistake.

Economists are so particular about looking at every problem from all sides that it often feels like they never have a firm opinion on anything. That can get pretty frustrating when you are asking them for advice. Harry Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, once famously requested to be sent a ‘one-armed economist’, because he was so tired of hearing every economist say, ‘On the one hand, this,’ and ‘On the other hand, that’.