Presidents Quotes

Campaigns often make standing on principle the highest of virtues - and listening to your opponents a sure sign of weakness. It's the virtual opposite of what it takes to succeed in office. Squaring the circle takes a powerful combination of skills. But presidents who can campaign and compromise are generally the most successful.

I would say to my colleague that the misery index, inflation and unemployment, when added together is the lowest it has been in the last series of Presidents, even going back to Jimmy Carter. So I think the Bush administration is doing a good job.

I've never been a fan of presidents who place blame on their predecessors or who accept credit for events that couldn't have been engineered so soon in their tenure.

All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf.

Presidents grow up in the White House. The times shape the man.

We're making this as entertainment. But God willing, if this show stays on and people see a woman in that office for a while, I think it will help people become more used to it. It's certainly about time that we had a few female presidents.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

Presidents with strong nerves are decisive. They don't balk at unpopular decisions. They are willing to make people angry. Bush had strong nerves. Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not. Obama is a people pleaser, a trait not normally associated with nerves of steel.

Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.

Nowadays even presidents, vice-presidents, and heads of big agencies are opening their minds to accept psychic phenomena, because they know it works.

And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing.

My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the presidents. I don't think Kennedy should have done it. I don't think Johnson should have done it, and I don't think we should have done it.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

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.

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.

I have worked with Presidents since Eisenhower. We serve together.

US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.

From George Washington to George W. Bush, presidents have invoked God's name in the performance of their official duties.

The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.

Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires.

Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.

We draw our Presidents from the people. It is a wholesome thing for them to return to the people. I came from them. I wish to be one of them again.

I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war.

You got to have people at the top who respond to and are selected by presidents.

I am grateful to President George W. Bush for PEPFAR, which is saving the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to both Presidents Bush for the work we've done together after the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.

I was chef to the French Presidents between '56 and '59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn't even see them.

What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped.