Lady Bird Johnson Quotes

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.

Where flowers bloom so does hope.

Wildflowers are the stuff of my heart!

My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth.

When I no longer thrill to the first snow of the season, I'll know I'm growing old.

It's odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don't quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.

Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them

The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing that all of us share. it is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become...

The challenge we now face is to build on the record of the past, to continue accepting new responsibilities and seeking new opportunities to serve.

[O]nce the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once an can no longer walk-through beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

Many times I have made a plea to save wildflowers along the fence rows. The sumac, the wild roses, the wisteria, the sunflowers, the gayfeathers stay in the fence rows and can be a nesting spot for quail, rabbits, birds,and other small animals.

Things are not going well here….Vietnam is getting worse by the day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with great disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.

I’ll never forgive Lyndon’s boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project,” she later recalled. “But I went ahead and talked about wildflowers so as not to scare anybody, because I knew if the people came to love wildflowers they’d have to eventually care about the land that grew ’em.

While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because neighbors are so many

You do what you can where you are. You musn’t feel impotent because you’re not all powerful.

Encourage and support your kids because children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.

At the Texas fat farm, I met Ann Landers (aka Eppie Lederer), a famous advice columnist, and Lady Bird Johnson, who both took me under their (overweight) wings, which was an uncomfortable place to be. Lady Bird, when I told her the title of Star Wars, thought I’d said Car Wash, and Ann/Eppie gave me a lot of unsolicited advice over a less-than-filling dinner of a burnt-looking partridge that seemed to have been singed and then torched. It was still more than enough;

They feel that if I have any kind of life at all, I am going to enjoy it as best I can because I may not be here tomorrow. This is what the youth of America is crying today. They also feel that if my education is going to only bring me a diploma, that I will not even have a job waiting for me afterwards, why should I even try to get a diploma? There are boys now that I know across this nation who feel it does not pay to be a good guy today, “Why should I be a good guy? If I am a bad guy, I get thrown in jail and I have a record or the Government is going to take care of me.

The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs: if Nixon had made up his mind which he wanted, the Northern Negro or Southern white vote; if the Puerto Rican Catholic bishops had made their intolerant intervention into Puerto Rican politics earlier and if Nixon had taken advantage of it; if the hysterical States-Righters of Dallas had not roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the hotel lobby; if Eisenhower had been used earlier; if Nixon had moved as forthrightly as did John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the Martin Luther King arrest; if only the citizen Democrats of California and the new coagulating boss groups of California had been able to work together in harness, as they could not; if Nixon had clung to his original television strategy and not panicked; if Nixon had clung to the original Forward theme of Hall and Shepley—an interminable series of ifs can be strung together to account for, reverse or multiply the tiny margin of 112,000 popular votes by which Kennedy led Nixon. Yet when all these ifs are strung together, they are only the froth and the foam in the wake of the strategies of the two candidates who sought to lead the American people.

Her encouragement and reassurance were constant and extravagant. Once, not seeing her at a public function, he demanded, with something of his old snarl, “Where’s Lady Bird?” and she replied, “Right behind you, darling. Where I’ve always been.” At a conference at which he became agitated, she slipped him a note. “Don’t let anybody upset you. You’ll do the right thing. You’re a good man.

Many have questioned how Lyndon Johnson could have put his closest protégé and right hand man John Connally in mortal danger by having him ride with JFK in the presidential limousine in the Dallas motorcade . Indeed, Johnson maneuvered desperately to get Connally moved to the vice-presidential car and substitute his archenemy Yarborough in the presidential vehicle. Senator George Smathers said in his memoirs that JFK complained to him prior to the trip about an effort by LBJ to get first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to ride in the vice presidential car, an idea JFK flatly rejected.39 Shortly before Kennedy’s death in the motorcade LBJ would visit the president’s hotel room and try again to convince him to have Connally and Yarborough swap places. Again, JFK refused, and Johnson stormed from the room after a shouting match.40 The outburst was so loud that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to her husband that Johnson “sounded mad.”41 Perhaps this explains LBJ’s taciturn behavior from the moment the presidential motorcade left Love Field for Dealey Plaza. An earlier rain had subsided, giving way to sunny skies. The crowds were large and friendly, yet LBJ stared straight ahead and never cracked a smile or waved to the crowds as did Lady Bird, Senator Yarborough, the Connallys, and the Kennedys. LBJ would actually tell Robert Kennedy, “of all things in life, this [campaigning] is what I enjoy most.”42 Normally, the gregarious Johnson would wave his hat, pose and wave to the crowd and shout “howdy,” but on this day he seemed non-expressive and focused. New 3-D imaging analysis and more sophisticated photographic analysis now show without question that LBJ ducked to the floor of his limousine before the first shots were fired.43

In later years, when Lady Bird Johnson would talk about the time that her husband had been a senator, she would sometimes say, "those were the happiest twelve years of our lives." Those years had been happy - and now they were over. The Senate had been Lyndon Johnson's home. Now he had left it.

But the words that lingered longest in the public imagination were those from Romeo and Juliet, “When I think of President Kennedy,” Bobby said, “I think of what Shakespeare said … “‘When he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’” The hall burst again into applause. In a hotel room off the boardwalk, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Dave Powers watched the proceedings on television and wept. Elsewhere, Johnson men chafed at Bobby’s reference to the “garish sun.” An obvious, petty jab, they said. It was just like Bobby. After the twenty-minute film, as the lights in the hall were raised, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson entered the presidential box in which Bobby and Ethel had watched the tribute. Delegates began to cheer; the organ began a rousing reprise of “Hello, Lyndon!” The president shook Bobby’s hand. As Bobby and Ethel stepped to the back of the box, Johnson generously beckoned them forward. They sat at Lady Bird’s side while the president, moments later, gave his acceptance speech. “Let us now turn to our task!” Johnson charged the convention hall crowd in a fervent thirty-five-minute speech. “Let us be on our way!

He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.

When tourism was connected to beautification, with wildflower trails, wildflower festivals, great gardens, we pretty much took the word beauty out of the sole province of the "ladies at a tea party" to the province of the business community.

And sometimes I think the greatest courage in the world is to get up in the morning and go about a day’s work. That is one of the things I like about him. He keeps on and on and on. —Lady Bird Johnson, White House diary, August 27, 1968

People shouldn't be throwing their empty bottles (or the caps) out on the side of the road. Don't they listen to Lady Bird Johnson? Besides, if people are throwing their beer bottles into the weeds, they're probably drinking and driving, and that's way worse than littering. Their wrecked car--or somebody else's--might be the next thing littering the roadside.

that he has even a little hope of controlling. I know that it is a racking year for Lyndon physically, and it must be mentally and spiritually. And sometimes I think the greatest courage in the world is to get up in the morning and go about a day’s work. That is one of the things I like about him. He keeps on and on and on.