Truman Quotes

1. "And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up."
Author: Alice Walker

2. "My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man."
Author: Alvin Ailey

3. "Hungry Jack's real name was Charles R. Hoofard.He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.History is full of shit like that."
Author: Andrew Smith

4. "When you first saw 'The Truman Show,' did anyone else walk around for the next week not picking your nose just in case?"
Author: Anna Kendrick

5. "Truman Flynn is a piece of paper in my coat pocket. He is a memory of water and of loss, his hand sliding free from mine, no way to hold on."
Author: Brenna Yovanoff

6. "I would say that President Roosevelt probably was more intimately in touch with the press corps at the White House than President Truman was."
Author: Clifton Daniel

7. "Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers."The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth--over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows."
Author: Dan Brown

8. "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 …"
Author: Daniel Kahneman

9. "Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations...He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions."
Author: David McCullough

10. "With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that."
Author: David McCullough

11. "Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese."
Author: Dorothy Day

12. "Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too."
Author: E.L. Doctorow

13. "For The Truman Show, I worked for a few weeks, do my gig, then I was done."
Author: Ed Harris

14. "So, what is it that I bring to her?" [Angus]"Strength. Security. Stability. All the best ‘s' words." [Truman]Truman smirked and so did Angus."
Author: Elizabeth Finn

15. "We support President Truman's civil rights program."
Author: Eugenie Anderson

16. "My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman."
Author: George Plimpton

17. "Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
Author: Gerald Clarke

18. "Obama has been perhaps the most partisan President since Truman. He hasn't learned to be civil - note his insulting speech to Paul Ryan, who did us the courtesy of scoring a budget. The president has to talk to Republicans when it comes to the debt ceiling. He has reached the debt ceiling before anyone expected."
Author: Grover Norquist

19. "If Truman hadn't published 'Answered Prayers' in parts, he'd have had the drive to finish it. The peacocks took it away from him."
Author: Jack Dunphy

20. "That was the principle of reparations to which President Truman agreed at Potsdam. And the United States will not agree to the taking from Germany of greater reparations than was provided by the Potsdam Agreement."
Author: James F. Byrnes

21. "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?"
Author: James K. Morrow

22. "If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon."
Author: Jeff Greenfield

23. "Dukakis." A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

24. "So you like it here in Truman?" I pull my eyes from the road and face my stepbrother. "I'm about to weird you out, so brace yourself." "Nuh-uh. Don't do it. Do notsay—" "I love you." "Oh, man! Dude." I start to giggle."
Author: Jenny B. Jones

25. "I have three favorite politicians: Reagan, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy - Bobby for showing remarkable political courage despite being loathed by many on both sides."
Author: Joe Scarborough

26. "And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal."
Author: John Kenneth Galbraith

27. "Hi Allan, it's Harry''Which Harry?''Truman, Allan. Harry S. Truman, the president, damn it!''How nice! That was a good meal we had Mr President, thank you. I hope you weren't required to fly the plane home?"
Author: Jonas Jonasson

28. "I am the heterosexual Truman Capote."
Author: Joseph Epstein

29. "Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth."
Author: Joshua Foer

30. "Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy."
Author: Ken Hollings

31. "I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers."
Author: Kiran Desai

32. "We have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare—"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

33. "I liked Truman very much. He was precise and businesslike. After a while, it was his turn."
Author: Lord Mountbatten

34. "The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other. There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause."
Author: Nancy Gibbs

35. "According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians."
Author: Oliver Stone

36. "I would like to say that no man ever was given finer cooperation than that given me by President Truman."
Author: Paul Hoffman

37. "At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education."
Author: Paul Hoffman

38. "Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him."
Author: Rich Little

39. "Mr. Truman studiously avoided giving power to his White House staff that has been characteristic of recent administrations. Staff people in the White House, with no responsibility but incredible authority is one of the reasons we're now in so much trouble."
Author: Stuart Symington

40. "I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with Marilyn Monroe and that's where I started. It doesn't make any sense because he was gay, but it was just the idea of the short guy and the beautiful blonde out of his league. That's where I started, but very quickly it became about me."
Author: Teddy Thompson

41. "To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.Truman Capote"
Author: Truman Capote

42. "Nunca les doy el infierno. Sólo les digo la verdad y ellos piensan que es el infierno. — Harry S. Truman"
Author: Yehuda Berg

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