Book

Where the Buck Stops

: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman

Offers the late president's candid reflections on his office and leadership, his predecessors, politics and government in America, and his ever-controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

(7 total)

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Harry S Truman (7)

“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 com…”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, Ordinary Man, Distinguished, Ford's Theater, Lincoln's Assassination

“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 S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: Dictators, Truth, lying

“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…”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: George Washington, Virginia, Eulogies

“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, t…”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: Politicians, John Quincy Adams

“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.”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: leader, Persuasion

“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 ser…”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: Education, Law School, education can change the world

“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.”

— Harry S Truman, amazon.com

Tagged: Washington, dC, Doers, Thinkers