Give 'em Hell, Harry!

The more I hear about Bush and the longer I live under his debacle of a presidency, the more I can’t help but compare him to Harry Truman, whom I consider my favorite president. I’ve always admired Truman for his plainspoken common sense, his zero tolerance policy for bullshit, and blunt honesty. It's too bad we don't have a president like him today.

Truman was the last president not to have a college degree, but he was in no way uneducated. A lifelong, avid reader, he was self-educated and could have easily run intellectual circles around the present resident of the White House. He also has the distinction of being the last president who did not leave the presidency as a millionaire.

Following is a list of Truman quotes. Enjoy!

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

I would rather have peace in the world than be President.

The buck stops here.

When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn’t for you. It’s for the Presidency.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants

All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

When even one American-who has done nothing wrong-is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth-then all Americans are in peril.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

The Republicans believe in the minimum wage -- the more the minimum, the better.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

Republicans don’t like people who talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don’t talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.

These polls that the Republican candidate is putting out are like sleeping pills designed to lull the voters into sleeping on election day. You might call them sleeping polls.

Herbert Hoover once ran on the slogan, “Two cars in every garage”. Apparently the Republican candidate this year is running on the slogan, “Two families in every garage”.

Any denial of human rights is a denial of the basic beliefs of democracy.

There isn’t any doubt that a woman would make a good president. They make good senators, good member of the House of Representatives, and have held other important offices in the government of the United States.

I do not understand a mind which sees a gracious beneficence in spending money to slay and maim human beings in almost unimaginable numbers and deprecates the expenditure of a smaller sum to patch up the ills of mankind.