Great Society Quotes - Page 2

• Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

  Rush Limbaugh

  War, Believe, Japan

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• If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Doe, Gone, Lbj

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• If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.

  Strom Thurmond

  Believe, Government, Growth

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• This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first chance to build a Great Society, a place where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of man's labor.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Life, Men, Society

  Address accepting Democratic presidential nomination, Atlantic City, N.J., 27 Aug. 1964

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• Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Ethics, Socialism, Made

  "Law, Legislation and Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 11 : The Discipline of Abstract Rules and the Emotions of the Tribal Society, 1973.

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• In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Lying, Critical Analysis, Society

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.226, Harvard University Press

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• But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Destiny, Challenges, Society

  The Great Society, delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

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• To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

  George McGovern

  Military, War, Failure

  1973 Lecture at Oxford University, 21 Jan.

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• The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that...in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

  Adam Smith

  Wise, Men, Hands

  "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" by Adam Smith, (Section II, Chap. II), 1759.

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• In the Small group the individual can know the effects of his actions on his several fellows, and the rules may effectively forbid him to harm them in any manner and even require him to assist them in specific ways. In the Great Society many of the effects of a person's actions on various fellows must be unknown to him. It can, therefore, not be the specific effects in the particular case, but only rules which define kinds of actions prohibited or required, which must serve as guides to the individual.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Groups, May, Way

  "Law, Legislation and Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Volume 2: "The Mirage of Social Justice". Chapter 9: "'Social' or Distributive Justice", 1973.

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• For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.

  Mark Steyn

  Black, Population, Looks

  Mark Steyn (2011). “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”, p.206, Regnery Publishing

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• If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.

  Philippe Falardeau

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• The president who did the most for black Americans in 20th century history was Lyndon Johnson, and he got his hands dirty by dealing with Southern senators, Southern congressmen, horse trading with them, cajoling them, learning what not to talk about. And he got civil rights passed and Great Society programs. That should be the model. Get over yourself.

  Steve Inskeep

  Horse, Dirty, Rights

  Source: www.npr.org

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• The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.

  Charles Krauthammer

  War, Community, Poverty

  "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics". Book by Charles Krauthammer, 2013.

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• The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

  Bill Moyers

  Running, War, Believe

  Source: progressive.org

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• In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for mans interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nations life.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Opportunity, Desire, Quality

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1966). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965”, p.262, Best Books on

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• A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

  Walter Lippmann

  Media, Privilege, Urban

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• LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

  Mark Steyn

  Detroit, Lbj, Accomplish

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• Simple old-fashioned values that come from a sense of community are the key to a great society. I believe we all have that sense from childhood memories, when life was simple. It's those memories that should drive us to reflect on our values.

  Lindsay Fox

  Memories, Believe, Simple

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• All great cathedrals began their building by the placement of a single stone. The building unit of a great society is the individual.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Stones, Building, Individual

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• A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Men, Thinking, Society

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.98, Simon and Schuster

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• Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

  Aneurin Bevan

  Our Generation, Tasks, Generations

  David A. Reisman, Aneurin Bevan (1996). “In Place of Fear”, Pickering & Chatto Publishers

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• Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.

  George Gilder

  Broken, Income, Matter

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• In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers - dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Angel, College, Years

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• I am glad that I am not raising kids today. And I’m rather pessimistic that my grandchildren will enjoy the great society that I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime. I really think it’s coarsened. It’s coarsened in so many ways. One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can’t go to a movie — or watch a television show for that matter — without hearing the constant use of the F-word — including, you know, ladies using it. People that I know don’t talk like that!

  Antonin Scalia

  Kids, Thinking, Grandchildren

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