Years When Presidents Quotes & Sayings

I've done it 30 years. I don't know what there is to gain by doing it 40. But I think there is something about doing it over that length of time that says something. That's seven U.S. presidents and five presidents of McDonald's. — Don Novello

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. — Sam Harris

Presidents generally do what they are good at in their first four years, then spend their second term responding to the agendas imposed upon them by events. — Dick Morris

I'm old enough now that I've been around and I've seen a lot more things than I had seen when I started this program 27 years. I have seen presidents in action. I have been to the White House a number of times. I have been to fundraisers. I have been seen what happens at fundraisers. I've seen how elected officials treat fundraisers and donors and, believe me, the world revolves around them. — Rush Limbaugh

Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.
But somehow, over these last months, Laila and Aziza - a harami like herself, as it turned out - had become extensions of her, and now, without them, the life Mariam had tolerated for so long suddenly seemed intolerable.
We're leaving this spring, Aziza and I. Come with us, Mariam. — Khaled Hosseini

Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined. — Reza Aslan

As you know, several times, McCain talked about serving his country in Vietnam, which is a nice change after 16 years and two presidents who could never quite explain how they got out of serving their country in Vietnam. — Jay Leno

Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism. — Yuval Noah Harari

Moskin has brought together with care and lucidity an inside history of American diplomacy written through the eyes of the many diplomats who conceived and carried it out over 225 years. You experience the challenges, successes, and foibles. Over time, the Foreign Service evolved into a professional cadre serving the public and presidents, often at the peril of their lives. Anyone interested in understanding our diplomacy, what makes it tick, and how it strives to serve the public interest should read this masterful history. — Thomas R. Pickering

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texa ... s? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. — John F. Kennedy

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. — David Levithan

A few public hangings will really change behavior. One of our Presidents said if he could execute three people each year for no cause, it would make it a lot easier to govern. When someone said that's not enough, he said, "Oh yes it is, because I'd publish the list of people under consideration." — Charlie Munger

It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. — Gore Vidal

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I've been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it's ending 'don't ask, don't tell,' making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples. — Barack Obama

Presidents and speakers for over 100 years had tried to pass affordable care for all Americans. It was challenged over and over. The Supreme Court declared it constitutional. — Nancy Pelosi

I am 73 years old. I've seen everything. I've met the kings, the queens, the presidents, I've been around the world. I have one thing that I would like to do: to try to reach peace. — Ariel Sharon

I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, judges and generals, unless they themselves supply the best specimens of the same; and that supplying one or two such specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years. — Walt Whitman

Almost every Fed chairman in the past 60 years has manipulated
interest rates to brighten the economic outlook for incumbent presidents
or newly elected presidents who won by large margins. The
purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has fallen 94 percent in the past
100 years. The only way you can create inflation is by creating more
money that is backed by the same reserve assets; the Fed is the only
entity that can create more money. Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing
(QE) programs have pumped billions of unfunded dollars into the
economy, thereby setting us up for massive inflation in the very near
future. If this isn't a form of financial terrorism, it is incompetence of the highest order. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Stupid arbitrary shit means the president of the United States can wait six years before even saying the disease's name. Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved. We did not choose our identity, but we were chosen to die by it. — David Levithan

In the last 100 years only Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford lost their bids for reelection. President Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term. — Juan Williams

I've been able to dine with presidents, with leaders of corporations, traveled for 14 years with (financier and philanthropist) Michael Milken, who has taught me so much about life. Hanging around with them, it's nothing I could have believed in grade school. I could be with all of them? Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Dean Martin ... this former third-string pitcher from the Norristown High baseball team and the son of an Italian immigrant? I really am in awe when I think that has happened to me. What a life. — Tommy Lasorda

There's a grand tradition of a lot of interesting stuff that happens to these post-presidents. Especially in this day and age where you leave office in your 50s and you can live another 40 years, easily. That's a lot of time. — David Mandel

Over the past five years, I've met several presidents, several secretaries of education ... and there is no plan. If you want to save your children, you're going to have to do it yourself. It's just us. — Geoffrey Canada

But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do anything to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime.165 — David Graeber

There is a reason the Democrats have had only two Presidents since 1968 and have managed to lose control of both houses of Congress in recent years. There is a reason they keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And it's not fraud and it's not dirty politics and it's not stupid voters. It's the plain and simple fact that the majority of those who vote don't like them. — Pat Sajak

Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have all complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one-time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington. — Steve Kroft

The man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents. — Ann Coulter

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

You've all seen over the last eight years what President Obama means to this country. He is the embodiment of honor, resolve, and character - one of the finest presidents we have ever had. — Joe Biden

from The Prep Pantheon: An All-Time Great Alumni Association

Caroline Kennedy. Concord Academy '75. Harvard '80. On technical points Preppier than Mummy. During four years at Harvard Square, an unnatural fiber never went near her body (except for the shell of her L. L. Bean down vest). Her lacrosse game was ruthless, her brunch technique dazzling (smoked heavily, sat with the descendents of three other presidents). — Lisa Birnbach

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

That doesn't necessarily mean that the story isn't true, ... But what it does mean, then, is that at this moment we simply do not have enough evidence, in my view, for any conclusion to be reached - that the presidents have been lying to us for all these years and that what we've been told was just a pack of lies. — Floyd Abrams

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah. — Alistair Cooke

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency. — Rick Perlstein

The phone company handles 84 billion calls a year-everything from kings, queens, and presidents to the scum of the earth. — Lily Tomlin

Wow. Losing 95 percent of your audience in just five years. That basically makes Obama the NBC of presidents. — John Oliver

So when it came to role models, I looked at presidents' wives. Of course, you're talking about a farm girl who stood in the fields, dreaming, years ago, wishing she was that kind of person. But if I had been that kind of person, do you think I could sing with the emotions I do? You sing with those emotions because you've had pain in your heart. — Tina Turner

I think most presidents are amazed at the overwhelming responsibility they have when they enter office and the tremendous amount of work there is. See, a modern president has far more responsibility than a president years ago. And if I were rewriting the Constitution, I would suggest a president be more like a monarch and then have a prime minister under him. — Billy Graham

The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome - so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic. — Barack Obama

All of our presidents come into office looking so vigorous ... They grow grayer and grayer, and by the time they leave, they're as white as the building they live in ... I have one big advantage: I've been coloring my hair for years. So you're not going to see me turn white in the White House. — Hillary Clinton

I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-presidential years, of all of the American presidents in the 20th century. — Roger Morris

It does not require much historical knowledge (though it may require a certain historical perspective) to see that many, if not all, of the "aristocratic" elements of the Constitution (as in other countries) have gradually disappeared or were washed away during the past two hundred years, while the monarchic powers of the presidency and the democratic extent of majority rule became more and more overwhelming. — John Lukacs

Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god's existence? It makes no sense.
If the rivers of blood on Stalin's hands and Mao's hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years' worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It's not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god's likelihood of existence, then believers lose.
It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon. — Guy P. Harrison

In recent years, even as the court has become an increasingly political body, the Senate is not focused on preserving any perceived ideological balance when Democrat presidents have appointed people to the court. — Sam Brownback