President Candidate Quotes

#1. Barack Obama didn't get elected president, would never have been elected president, had he decided to run as a black candidate. In order to reach the broadest number of people you have to speak to their interests as broadly as you can.

Gwen Ifill

#2. I am not interested in being vice president of the United States. I've let the candidate know. If the candidate asks me to be vice president, the answer is I got to say yes. But he's not going to ask me.

Brian Williams

#3. New Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is fluent in Chinese. In a short period of time the Republicans have come quite a long way. The last Republican president wasn't even fluent in English.

David Letterman

#4. I played a father a few times. You don't have to shoot heroin to play a heroin addict ... I'm not running for president but I could play a candidate. Most of the time, you don't really have to have those things in your life to understand what they're like.

George Clooney

#5. Obviously I'm young and I'm also Hispanic, two important groups in this election. And I'm confident that I can do a good job in articulating why President Obama ought to be the candidate that Americans select for the next four years.

Julian Castro

#6. Lindsey Graham is now the seventh Republican running for president. If you're keeping score, that's basically one Republican candidate for every two Republican voters.

Conan O'Brien

#7. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry came down pretty hard on fellow candidate Howard Dean this weekend. After Dean misspoke several times, Kerry said you can't misspeak 15 times in a week and be president. And Bush said, 'You can't'?

Jay Leno

#8. I learned a lot about America and a lot about Pat Schroeder, and that's why I will not be a candidate for President.

Patricia Schroeder

#9. It's starting to look like Donald Trump may be a serious presidential candidate. If you're in my line of work, Trump running for president for real is the greatest thing that has ever happened.

Conan O'Brien

#10. Ah, political physics. Someone wins an election and, poof, they are a candidate for vice president. Ridiculous.

Mark McKinnon

#11. We have the most liberal, the most leftist candidate who has ever run for president in my lifetime; he's a sitting duck. This guy's policies are aimed at destroying the age of American greatness.

Rush Limbaugh

#12. It's how you make decisions that matters, and that ought to be the question that people ask of any candidate for any executive office, whether it's mayor, governor or president. How do you make decisions? Who do you want in the room helping you make those decisions?

Tom Vilsack

#13. I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return. I've shared the pain of families who've lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who've lost their jobs.

Barack Obama

#14. I think I'm the best candidate not just to beat President Obama, but to do what is necessary to get this country going, a conviction conservative who can rally the American public around a common set of values.

Rick Santorum

#15. I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.

Ronald Reagan

#16. In a new interview, the president discussed the upcoming election. He said that Hillary Clinton is going to do great as a presidential candidate. When asked how Biden would do, Obama said, 'Hillary's going to do great.'

Jimmy Fallon

#17. Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change
I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect.

George W. Bush

#18. It seems likely MK-Ultra or a Manchurian Candidate, or possibly both, may have been involved in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the US Presidential candidate most political analysts agree would have been elected President had he lived.

James Morcan

#19. I don't think you can be a credible, modern candidate for president without making the environment a major part of your platform.

Graydon Carter

#20. President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution. Then he raised taxes and in '92 ran as an establishment moderate - same candidate, two very different campaigns.

Ted Cruz

#21. The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic.

Chris Hedges

#22. I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political person, one of the things I appreciated about this president, in the past year especially, is he is a fantastic candidate.

Ed Gillespie

#23. I'm not trying to get myself up a notch on the ladder by shoving somebody else down on the ladder, whether it's a candidate or the president of the United States or anybody else. I just don't believe that's the way one oughta campaign, I've never done that.

George H. W. Bush

#24. I want to be president because I have the sensitivity, as a woman, to listen. I'm a different candidate ... different because I don't belong to powerful, privileged groups, because I'm honest.

Josefina Vazquez Mota

#25. Why did Hillary [Clinton] go to Arkansas? Why does she put up with it? In the beginning era of feminism she's considered one of the leading lights. Why does she put up with it? And the short answer is :She's nominated president, the Democrat Party candidate.

Rush Limbaugh

#26. No one knows, and few conceive, the agony of mind that I have suffered from the time that I was made by circumstances, and not by my volition, a candidate for the Presidency till I was dismissed from that station by the failure of my election.

John Quincy Adams

#27. Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President.

Samuel L. Jackson

#28. Will Herman Cain become the first black President that I acknowledge? I call him a dark horse because he's an unlikely candidate who surged forward, and not because he's a horse.

Stephen Colbert

#29. I've long thought that Marco Rubio would make a strong G.O.P. candidate for president. While he was brought into office by surfing on the Tea Party wave, he has proven himself not to be wedded to the frequent lunacy of those folks.

Kurt Eichenwald

#30. There's always a risk when the candidate becomes president: Will he deliver what is expected of him?

Francois Hollande

#31. It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself.

Matt Taibbi

#32. This is what happens, when, for the first time in modern history, a candidate resorts to lawsuits to try to overturn the outcome of an election for president.

James Baker

#33. National security, the government is in charge of that. And you better have a president that understand the threats we [the state] face and what we have to do about it. And if you can't articulate that as a candidate, you cannot be commander in chief.

Marco Rubio

#34. If you look at that 2008 Democratic primary, there was no more formidable, unstoppable candidate - other than an incumbent President - in modern times than Hillary Clinton.

Ted Cruz

#35. An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward, 'Gentlemen, let there be no mistake. I should make a good president, but a very bad candidate.

James Bryce

#36. The Socialist Party will no longer be running a candidate for president. The Democratic Party is leading this country to Socialism much faster than we could ever hope to.

Norman Thomas

#37. If you want a president to stop amnesty, to secure the borders and keep us safe, then support a candidate who has led the fight to stop amnesty to secure the borders and to keep us safe.

Ted Cruz

#38. In my lifetime, we have lost a President, a Civil Rights leader and a Presidential candidate - all to gun violence.

Marianne Williamson

#39. Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

Robert Dallek

#40. As a president I will be like the candidate that I am, a respectful candidate, a rallying candidate, a normal candidate for a normal presidency, at the service of the Republic.

Francois Hollande

#41. Who can guarantee that he [Alexander Milinkevich, a Belarussian opposition presidential candidate] is the most promising candidate capable of competing with the incumbent president?

Alexander Lukashenko

#42. I've said time and again, I'm a pro-life candidate, I'll be a pro-life president.

Mitt Romney

#43. In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.'

Allen West

#44. I believe Donald Trump is the best guy for president; and I'm not going to shy away and I take the risk. I could just stay home and don't talk about any candidate.

Joe Arpaio

#45. A 527 doesn't have a wife. It doesn't have a brother-in-law who knows a lot about politics, or a union president who calls and doesn't like the color of the suit, or bimbo eruptions. It's the perfect candidate, because it has no personal characteristics.

Roger Stone

#46. I wonder who really is the change candidate? It can't be both of them [Hillary Clinton & Barak Obama]. What would be a black man and a woman - how could that be different than the 43 other Presidents we've had?

Jon Stewart

#47. Humor is very very risky, particularly for a candidate, unless he's been in so long that it just doesn't matter, and he's not running for president. But it's just that people are so sensitive and so touchy, and you're just going to upset somebody without ever realizing it.

Mark Russell

#48. We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food-stamp president in the American history, in Barack Obama, and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.

Newt Gingrich

#49. I'm not just a candidate, I'm the President

Barack Obama

#50. The leading non-establishment Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, is just sailing past [establishment Republican candidates] in the polls. He is still surging. He is basically killing them all.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#51. I've been looking at some video clips on YouTube of President Obama - then candidate Obama - going through Iowa making promises. The gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I've seen, well, since the Kardashian wedding and the promise of 'til death do we part.

Mitt Romney

#52. Neither this nation nor this party can afford a candidate so captive to the demands of the intolerant right that we end up re-electing a president of the incompetent left.

Arlen Specter

#53. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters - and the church does not speak for me.

John F. Kennedy

#54. I don't have many litmus tests, but this is one: Any candidate who doesn't understand that we need to balance the budget should not be president of the United States.

Jim DeMint

#55. As a candidate, Clinton had - as all candidates do - torn into his predecessor for coddling China and promised that he would get tough on China's human rights abuses. As president, Clinton had - as all presidents do - come to see that the reality was a bit more complicated.

Michael Tomasky

#56. Former President George W. Bush has hired a man to lead his presidential think tank in Dallas. The man was hired because he was the only candidate who could say the words, 'George W. Bush think tank' with a straight face.

Conan O'Brien

#57. Senate races are different from House races, in the sense that they are more candidate-driven. The higher the office - that is, I mean, governor, senator, president - the more important the candidate.

Judy Woodruff

#58. Is Romney a tea party candidate? I'd probably say that he's the least of the candidates running for president right now that would be considered a tea party candidate.

Tim Scott

#59. Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

Ronald Reagan

#60. I know of not one Republican candidate that would not appear publicly with Mitt Romney and I know many Democrats that don't even want to be in the same city - forget the same stage - with President Obama.

Pete Sessions

#61. I am not a party candidate, and if elected cannot be President of a party, but the President of the whole people.

Zachary Taylor

#62. I want to say that I cannot be intimidated or stopped. In order to put an end to various attempts to get rid of me as a possible candidate, I want to say that I'm running for president.

Vitali Klitschko

#63. There is no question that I would be the better president. But as for the campaign, are Americans ready for a general election in which both major party candidates are ADD? Quite frankly, it could provide an opening for a third party candidate, maybe someone backed by the evil Koch brothers.

Joe Biden

#64. You know, I think Marco Rubio would be a spectacular candidate for vice president. I think he would energize the country. I think he has a great story. He's bright. He's articulate.

Mario Diaz-Balart

#65. We have never had a more qualified and capable champion of personal and economic freedom than the 2012 Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States - Governor Gary Johnson.

Scott Boman

#66. I shouldn't want you to be surprised, or to draw any particular inference from my making speeches, or not making speeches, out there. I don't recall any candidate for President that ever injured himself very much by not talking.

Calvin Coolidge

#67. George W. Bush is not only a great president; he was a great candidate.

Ed Gillespie

#68. Wisdom is essential in a president, the appearance of wisdom will do in a candidate.

Eric Sevareid

#69. A candidate's faith is not the only consideration, but should be a major consideration in electing the president of the United States.

Robert Jeffress

#70. The Republicans tend to choose the candidate who came in second place in the last election, and Democrats tend to move on. Ask President Ed Muskie how it worked out to be the front-runner. Ask President Howard Dean how it worked out.

Brian Schweitzer

#71. I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

John F. Kennedy

#72. I hereby state, and mean all that I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve.

William T. Sherman

#73. Donald [Trump] is great at the one-liners, but he's a chaos candidate, and he'd be a chaos president. He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep our country safe.

Renee Montagne

#74. When you're bringing in a fairly unknown candidate challenging a sitting president, the population needs a lot more information than reduced coverage provides.

Walter Cronkite

#75. Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.

Cynthia P. Schneider

#76. It is because I owe America more than she has ever owed me that I am a candidate for president to the United States.

John McCain

#77. No president likes leaks, but it's worth noting candidate Trump's path to power was tread on a road of leaks. He didn't have a problem with leaks then. It's not a moral position if you only hold it when it applies to you.

Jake Tapper

#78. Again and again, Americans have voted for a president to keep them out of a war, only to see the "peace" candidate elected who then brings the nation into war.

Howard Zinn

#79. Today, I'm a candidate for the office of president of the United States of America. My kids can't believe I just said that.

Jon Huntsman Jr.

#80. Well, first of all, I was asked by Ross Perot on a telephone call in March of 1992 if, since he had committed on the Larry King Show to becoming a candidate for president, to get on all 50 ballots.

James Stockdale

#81. Well, I have one consolation. No candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority!

William Howard Taft

#82. Often President Obama's worst critics are Senator Obama and candidate Obama.

Peter Schiff

#83. Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.

Eileen Myles

#84. If you're running to be president of the United States, you can't just tell people you're going to make America great again. I think you need to begin to explain exactly how you're going to do it policy-wise. We're not going to win a general election with a candidate that refuses to detail policy.

Marco Rubio