Home > Work > Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman
1 " The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it. Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you. "
― Harry Truman , Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman
2 " I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading, "
3 " I once described Washington as a doer surrounded by thinkers. He knew how to make the thinkers work for him, and only a truly superb politician and leader is able to do that. "
4 " People who run for office and are defeated aren’t rejected in the usual sense of the word. They’re just defeated because they couldn’t get enough votes that one time. It doesn’t mean the public despises them. It’s a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that’s all. The examples I’ve given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln’s cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don’t become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don’t have any trouble. "
5 " My definition of a leader in a free country is a man who can persuade people to do what they don’t want to do, or do what they’re too lazy to do, and like it. "
6 " I’ll come back to George Washington just long enough to say goodbye to him. He was a great man and a good man, and when his work was over as our great first president, he went back home to Virginia for his long-earned rest. Just three years later, on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he went to his final rest. As "
7 " everything I’ve read about his death indicates that he died peacefully, and perhaps he died because he’d accomplished his purpose. He "
8 " him up, of course. I don’t know whether they "
9 " He was the best kind of ordinary man, and when I say that he was an ordinary man, I mean that as high praise, not deprecation. That’s the highest praise you can give a man, that he’s one of the people and becomes distinguished in the service that he gives other people. I don’t know of any higher compliment you can pay a man than that. He was one of the people, and he wanted to stay that way. And he was that way until the day he died. One of the reasons he was assassinated was because he didn’t feel important enough to have the proper guards around him at the Ford’s Theater. "
