Years As President Quotes & Sayings

We need a leader who can lower taxes, protect small businesses, and increase job creation nationwide. I have no doubt that John McCain appreciates the important role Hispanics play not only in the economy, but in our nation's culture as well
he has a track record with Hispanics for more than 20 years as a senator from Arizona. The American people need a strong leader who has the experience and the judgment to be the next President of the United States, and that man is John McCain. — Katie Barberi

For nearly three years, President Obama devoted a great deal of effort to finding compromises with Congressional Republicans. That was futile, in my view, since those Republicans had made it clear from the day he was inaugurated in 2009 that their plan was to oppose everything he wanted and then paint him as a failed president. — Andrew Rosenthal

Quanah Parker. As the years went by he became a shrewd businessman, built a large house, and successfully managed his farm and ranch. He traveled all over the country, and went to Washington to ride in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade. — Dee Brown

Senator [Stephen] Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. — Abraham Lincoln

As President, I will institute a procedure in which all convicted criminals will have this brass ring will be surgically implanted into their foreheads-Americans have a right to know who they can trust. I don't care if you're 5, 6, or 7 years old, if you're a first-time offender, you're gonna go to Purgatory and it's not gonna be fun! — Bob Backlund

Unfortunately, these past few years, you can work hard, try to be as successful as possible, follow the rules, and President Barack Obama will do everything he can to stand in your way. — Nikki Haley

The Obama years will be remembered as a cultural - and legal - tipping point for equality for all people who do not identify as strictly heterosexual, arguably the civil rights movement of our times. The president signed the bill repealing 'don't ask, don't tell.' The Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. — Charles M. Blow

Nothing you do in the White House matters. You know why not? Because as far as the mass of voting morons is concerned, while you're in office, you'll still be the worst single president they've ever had until you stop. Then it's some other poor bastard's turn. And even that doesn't matter, because ten, twenty years later, they'll look back on you, and wonder why they didn't appreciate you when they had you ... You don't get to make a difference. You don't get to do jack shit. You know what you get? ... You get an entry in the history book, and every 15 minutes, every day at Disneyworld, an animatronic puppet wearing your face will wave or nod when the spotlight hits it. — Neil Gaiman

A man named Vicente Fox was sworn in as president of Mexico, ending seventy-five years of control by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Across the border, the United States Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Bush v. Gore, deciding the 2000 presidential election and ensuring the term "hanging chad" took its place permanently in the English lexicon. Leninist guerrillas launched an attack in Istanbul, and a series of bombs exploded in downtown Manila, killing twenty-two people and injuring dozens more. Cambodia's failed coup slipped from network news bulletins, and the country returned once more to relative international obscurity. — Dan Eaton

I enjoyed my new position as vice president, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for 10 years as a senator. — Harry S. Truman

Came to deeply regret giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on that vote. He later asserted that the resolution gave him the sole authority to decide when the clock had run out on weapons inspections. On March 20, 2003, he decided that it had, and he launched the war, with the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to finish the job. Over the years that followed, many Senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them. As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake became more painful. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing. — Christina Romer

The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment. — Richard M. Nixon

As president, I watched in wonder as Nelson Mandela had the remarkable capacity to forgive his jailers following 26 years of wrongful imprisonment - setting a powerful example of redemption and grace for us all. — George H. W. Bush

And to bring people together we need a simple and straightforward progressive agenda which speaks to the needs of our people, and which provides us with a vision of a very different America. And what is that agenda? Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. It begins with jobs. If we are truly serious about reversing the decline of the middle class we need a major federal jobs program which puts millions of Americans back to work at decent-paying jobs. At a time when our roads, bridges, water systems, rail, and airports are decaying, the most effective way to rapidly create meaningful jobs is to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. That's why I've introduced legislation which would invest $1 trillion over five years to modernize our country's physical infrastructure. This legislation would create and maintain at least thirteen million good-paying jobs, while making our country more productive, efficient, and safe. And I promise you, as president I will lead that legislation into law. Trade. — Bernie Sanders

Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Speer had been imprisoned for his role in the use of slave labor during the war, but though he was found guilty for a number of crimes, and served nineteen years in prison, upon his release which was supported by such people as French president Charles DeGaulle and other high-ranking politicians, he was considered in many ways a "good German". He had admitted his guilt at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials after the war, and acknowledged that the crimes committed under Hitler would haunt Germany forever. He wrote his memoirs in prison and spoke not only about his complicity in the use of slave labor but also his attempts to thwart some of Hitler's more barbaric plans at the end of the war. Much of the proceeds from his bestselling memoirs went to Jewish organizations, though this was not discovered until after Speer had died. — Leonard Cooper

Many years ago, it was my opportunity to serve as president of the Canadian Mission. There we had a branch with very limited priesthood. We always had a missionary presiding over the branch. I received a strong impression that we needed to have a member of the branch preside there. — Thomas S. Monson

Back 12 years ago, when Dr. Mathews was president here, we had a plan that when I got ready to quit, we'd bring a certain guy in and he'd take over that day and I'd leave. But as time wore on, I realized that wouldn't have been good at all. — Bear Bryant

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing. — Peggy Noonan

As the refugee crisis unfolds across Europe, another is looming in our backyard. The number of children crossing the southwest border unaccompanied has quietly surged more than a year after President [Barack] Obama referred to the problem as a quote "urgent humanitarian situation." — Joy-Ann Reid

Bashir paused to watch a live CNN feed ... Bashir was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building.
As he studied the screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last shaking his head ruefully, "I'm a moderate Msulim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of the desk. "Your president Bush had done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years. — Greg Mortenson

In Lincoln's mind, at least as Lamon interpreted the story, "the illusion was a sign." Both the president-elect and his wife believed it meant he would not only survive his term in office, but four years later win reelection to a second one, only to die before it ended. — Harold Holzer

Those years [as the war progressed] would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State. — David Halberstam

Reagan was president. He had the authority to end the infighting, set policy, and advance American interests in the Middle East. Before him was a clear choice; Shultz arguing for engagement, Weinberger for disengagement. Engagement would likely have involved the use of military force; disengagement offered the comfort of a casualty-free retreat. In the post-Vietnam era, for this president, at this time, disengagement made more sense. He still talked a good game, but when it was time for a decision, he punted. "In the weeks immediately after the bombing," he later wrote, "I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave."58 And yet, fearful of another Vietnam, he waited a few months and then pulled the remaining marines out of Beirut. According to McFarlane many years later, his decision opened the door to the terrorism that has plagued the region and the world ever since. "I am convinced we could have stopped it then, just as it was starting, but Reagan chose not to. — Marvin Kalb

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined brand,- as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership. — Peggy Noonan

Lincoln may have shown how relieved he was that there had been none of the "outrage and violence" some had predicted in New York when a giant of a man neared him, and someone in the crowd cried out, "That's Tom Hyer," the retired prizefighter who had won fame with a 101-round victory years before. To which the president-elect replied, to much laughter: "I don't care, so long as he don't hit me. — Harold Holzer

President Obama is the kind of politician who puts promises on the record, and then calls that the record. But we are four years into this presidency. The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy as we are living it. — Paul Ryan

As you know, John McCain is an older, white-haired man who has been in the Senate for over twenty years, voted for the Iraq War, and said Barack Obama did not have the experience to be president. I'm sorry, that's our intro for next week when Joe Biden is on, I got confused. — Jay Leno

All I'm saying, as a fan, is I'm tired of the same song for 30 years. Can't we change the message a little? You've arrived. You have a black president. Every white guy in a commercial doesn't have to be the idiot and every black guy in a rap song doesn't have to be God's gift to the world. — Bill Maher

How to Tell the Truth and Get in Trouble I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in Montana, and I ran a feedlot operation there for twenty years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat is produced in this country. Today I am president of the International Vegetarian Union. Sure, I used to enjoy my steaks as much as the next guy. But if you knew what I know about what goes into them and what they can do to you, you'd probably be a vegetarian like me. And, believe it or not, as a pure vegetarian now who consumes no animal products at all, I can tell you that these days I enjoy eating more than ever. If you're a meat-eater in America, you have a right to know that you have something in common with most of the cows you've eaten. They've eaten meat, too. — Howard F. Lyman

As we think about the next 50 years, I remember a story President Kennedy told a week before he was killed. The story was about French Marshal Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, who walked one morning through his garden with his gardener. He stopped at a certain point and asked the gardener to plant a tree there the next morning. The gardener said, "But the tree will not bloom for 100 years." The marshal replied, "In that case, you had better plant it this afternoon. — Newton N. Minow

During the sixteen years I served as the secretary to the First Presidency, I attended hundreds of meetings where President Hunter was in attendance. In the course of these meetings, President Hunter's voice was heard less frequently than almost any other. That is quite amazing when one considers the popular perception of lawyers as being verbose, but it is not to suggest that he sat mute in these meetings. He was always actively involved; however, he did not feel the need to be heard on every subject under discussion. When he did speak, what he said was thoughtful and analytical. — Francis M. Gibbons

As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death
all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign countries still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them. — Jon Stewart

In January 1924, as a sweeping immigration measure awaited presidential signature, American Jewish Committee leader Louis Marshall asked to meet with President Calvin Coolidge to urge a veto. Coolidge refused to see him. The president's views were summed up in an article he had written a few years earlier in Good Housekeeping magazine, titled "Whose Country Is This?" "[B]iological laws show us that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races," Coolidge wrote. — J.J. Goldberg

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.
People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming
a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends
a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if
clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny
freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night
Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs
literally unraveled? I am alone
in the rectangular borough in the observatory,
where even fire trucks can't rescue
the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain. — Jeffrey McDaniel

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? ... The vice president has two duties: One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate .. the other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared with living a good part of time in the state of Arizona. — John McCain

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years ... And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini. — Hunter S. Thompson

Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement. — Roger Morris

Now, I'm an apolitical person (which I realize is its own kind of misleading political posture, but I think you know what I mean). I do not have conventional political affiliations. I follow presidential elections the same way I follow the NFL playoffs: obsessively and dispassionately. But Sarah Palin was (and is) a real problem. Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840. — Chuck Klosterman

I marched with you in the streets of Chicago to meet our immigration challenge. I fought with you in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform. And I will make it a top priority in my first year as President. — Barack Obama

In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity. — Harry S. Truman

As the President has indicated, my life has been a life of travel - for 60 years constantly moving over the wide world on journeys which first and last have taken me to 83 countries, and, what is more significant, to most of them again and again. — John Raleigh Mott

It's hard to say. I don't want to limit myself by saying one thing or another. I couldn't have imagined the path that these past five years have taken me, so I guess I'll just give a safe answer and say that I hope to be elected as the president of the United States in 2016. — Skylar Astin

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Madison wrote not only the United States Constitution, or at least most of it, but also the most searching commentary on it that has ever appeared. Each of them served as president of the United States for eight years. What they had to say to each other has to command attention. — Edmund Morgan

Consider that in a galaxy far, far away (otherwise known as the 1990s), President Clinton felt that he had to assure an isolationist Republican Congress - repeat after me, an isolationist Republican Congress - that the 20,000 U.S. peacekeeping troops he promised Bosnia as part of the Dayton Accords would only stay deployed for a single calendar year. — Matt Welch

Bobby Kennedy's conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president. — Thomas Mallon

A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it's been tested by recession and all manner of challenges - I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before. — Barack Obama

Eisenhower's speech contained an unsubtle dig at Rockefeller, in the guise of a dig at Kennedy: "Just as the Biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who ... continually mouth the allegations that America has become a second-rate military power." He was proceeded at the podium by his black special assistant E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown in with the President on Air Force One. "One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave," radio and TV audiences heard. "Tonight I stand before you as a trusted assistant to the President of the United" - and then the networks cut away for fear of offending their Southern affiliates. — Rick Perlstein

The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes. — Ed Gillespie

The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln. — Barack Obama

Whenever we doubt our own ability to achieve, it is worthwile pondering the obstacles that others have overcome. To name a few ...
*Napoleon overcame his considerable handicap, his tiny stature, to lead his conquering armies across Europe.
*Abraham Lincon failed in business aged 31, lost a legislative race and 32, again failed in business at 34, had his sweetheart die when he was 35, had a nervous breakdown at 36, lost congressional races aged 43, 46 and 48, lost a senatorial race at 55, failed in his efforts to become vice president of the U.S.A aged 56 and lost a further senatorial contest at 58. At 60 years of age he was elected president of the U.S.A and is now remembered as one of the great leaders in world history.
*Winston Churchill was a poor student with a speech impediment. Not only did he win a Nobel Prize at 24, but he became one of the most inspiring speakers of recent times.
It is not where you start that counts, but where you choose to finish. — Andrew Matthews

President Obama has been a disaster for America. He's wrecked our economy, saddled our children with more debt than America managed to rack up in 225 years, and gone around the world apologizing for our country - as if the greatest nation in the world needs to apologize for being a land of opportunity and freedom, which we were before Obama became president. — Donald Trump

Bush met with former President Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is 76 years old, or as Democrats call him 'their bright new star of the future.' — David Letterman

President Bush got an early Christmas gift. This week, President Bush was chosen as 'Person of the Year' by Time magazine. Not only that, Martha Stewart was chosen as person of the year by Doing Time magazine. — Conan O'Brien

Standing as a witness means many things. It encompasses the way we act, how we speak, and how we dress. When you are considering a young man as a companion, you would do will to follow the advice given some years ago by President David O. McKay: He must never "attempt to take advantage of [you. If] ... he shows [any] inclination to use you as a convenience or as a means of gratification, then you may [be sure] he is not prompted by love." It is very natural for young men and women to be attracted to each other, but they should be attracted in God-given ways rather than questionable ways, such as immodest dress. God-given attractions include your inner beauty, charm, decency, and goodness. — James E. Faust

When [Vladimir] Putin, a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, became Russia's president on December 31, 1999 - eight years after the failed coup attempt against (then Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator. — Garry Kasparov

Well it did not make excessive sense to say that 20 million people are the recognized government of a billion people that have their own institutions. We did not change it in the sense that we said this has to end, but there was a U.N. vote that transferred the legitimacy of China from Taiwan to Beijing. Beijing was recognized as the government of all of China. Then, under President Carter, we followed what the U.N. had already done eight years earlier. — Henry A. Kissinger

As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America's children as Hillary Clinton. — Donna Brazile

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. — Sarah Vowell

The famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to the inaugural address of Nelson Mandela. About the misattribution Williamson said, Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people. — Marianne Williamson

President Obama has two years left as president. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets to appoint two new Kardashian husbands. — David Letterman

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. — Nancy Gibbs

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, " 'does engage' in computer network exploitation," but "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including 'cyber' " [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its "customers," a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: — Glenn Greenwald

Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before. — Nigel Hamilton

When you look at 'Obamacare,' the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it's adding to cost. And as a matter of fact, when the president ran for office, he said that, by this year, he would have brought down the cost of insurance for each family by $2,500 a family. Instead, it's gone up by that amount. So it's expensive. Expensive things hurt families. So that's one reason I don't want it. — Mitt Romney

Do you know Aggrey Awori?' Mushana said, 'He's an old man.' Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of '63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori's brother was a minister in the Kenyan government. 'Awori is running for president.' 'Does he have a chance?' Mushana shrugged. 'Museveni will get another term. — Paul Theroux

In 1856 ... I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell. With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slave States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years ... I therefore voted for James Buchanan as President. — Ulysses S. Grant

had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an "order" to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, in his book It Worked for Me, writes, "In my thirty-five years of service, I don't ever recall telling anyone, 'That's an order.' And now that I think about it, I don't think I ever heard anyone else say it." Obama's "order," at Biden's urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order — Robert M. Gates

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life. — George H. W. Bush

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House. — Eleanor Roosevelt

For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East. — Barack Obama

I would rather be an independent senator, governed by my own views, going for the good of the country, uncontrolled by any thing which mortal man can bring to bear upon me, than to be president of the United States, put there as presidents of the United States have been for many years past. — John C. Calhoun

The law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years. And in my opinion - well, eight years is also long enough for an individual to serve as a representative for a specific Congressional district. — Michele Bachmann

For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987. — Suze Orman

Two years ago, George Bush felt prompted to address this issue. More spending on public education, said the president, isn't "the best answer." Mr. Bush went on to caution parents of poor children who see money "as a cure" for education problems. "A society that worships money ... ," said the president, "is a society in peril." The president himself attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts - a school that spends $11,000 yearly on each pupil, not including costs of room and board. If money is a wise investment for the education of a future president at Andover, it is no less so for the child of poor people in Detroit. But the climate of the times does not encourage this belief, and the president's words will surely reinforce that climate. — Jonathan Kozol

As son of a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. — John Eisenhower

A significant number of people believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago. During my tenure as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, national news agencies requesting interviews sometimes asked if they could film a tribal dance or if I would wear traditional tribal clothing for the interview. I doubt they asked the president of the United States to dress like a pilgrim for an interview. — Wilma Mankiller

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not ... You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok. — George McGovern

For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House - but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he'll get time off for good behavior. — Arthur C. Clarke

[President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year. — George Will

The film 'Boyhood' won the Golden Globe for best drama. It follows one guy's journey over the course of 12 years - or as Mitt Romney calls that, 'running for president.' — Jimmy Fallon

From World War II until 1981 the top marginal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican whom no one ever accused of being a socialist, the top rate was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, Americans with incomes of over $1 million (in today's dollars) paid a top marginal rate, on average, of 52 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the top tax rate on capital gains was 35 percent. But as income and wealth have accumulated at the top, so has the political power to reduce taxes. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were extended for two years in December 2010, capped top rates at 35 percent, their lowest level in more than half a century, and reduced capital gains taxes to 15 percent. — Robert B. Reich

I think to a certain extent, Clinton may have expected as the senior president that Obama would've reached out to him and asked for his council; he's done that very little. So, I think the relationship has not been good over the years. — Ed Rollins

After eight years as President I have only two regrets: that I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun. — Andrew Jackson

In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report. — Frederick Seitz

It's tougher to be a football coach than the President of the United States. You've got four years as a president, and they guard you. A football coach doesn't have anyone to protect him when things go wrong. — Harry S. Truman

Anyone who has walked through the deserted palaces of Versailles or Vienna realise how much of a part of the life of a nation is lost when a monarchy is abolished. If buckingham palace and windsor castle were transformed into museums, if one politician competed against another for president of the republic, Britain would be a sadder and less interesting place. Our politicians are not men such as could challenge more than a thousand years of history. — William Rees-Mogg

No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred. — Thomas Jefferson

President John F. Kennedy's Cigars
On February 7, 1962, President Kennedy announced to his staff that he needed some help finding as many of the prestigious Cuban Petit Upmann cigars as possible. He let it be known that he would like to have 1,000 of these cigars by the next morning. Being the President of the United States, his wish was granted when, on the morning of February 8th, his Press Secretary Pierre Salinger came in and deposited 1,200 cigars on Kennedy's desk. Smiling, Kennedy opened his desk, took out a document and signed it, banning importation of all Cuban-made products into the United States. Some years later when asked about that moment, Salinger said that there were actually 1,201 cigars. — Hank Bracker

When my father began to work with President John. F.Kennedy, we moved to Washington, D.C. I was fortunate in my pre-adolescent years, as my social and political consciousness was developing, to live at the epicentre of that dynamic, idealistic, and inspiring moment in U.S. political history, with its ethos of personal and civic responsibility, summed up so succinctly in his exhortation: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." — Queen Noor Of Jordan

And when I'm president, I can tell you this, my faith will not just influence the way I'll govern as president, it will influence the way I live my life. Because in the end, my goal is not simply to live on this earth for 80 years, but to live an eternity with my creator. And I will always allow my faith to influence everything I do. — Marco Rubio

One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned. — Ed Gillespie

Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity. — Eugene Jarecki

Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed. — Philip Roth

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine. — Sarah Vowell

For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.) — Jon Meacham

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago. — Brion McClanahan

Freeh knew the estrangement undermined the FBI. "The lost resources and lost time alone were monumental," he wrote. "So much that should have been straightforward became problematic in the extreme." But he felt compelled to keep a distance from the president. It deepened as the years went by. It became a danger to the United States. — Tim Weiner

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can't solve every problem.
But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it's been done in America for 221 years
block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand. — Barack Obama