President Ford Quotes

#1. There needs to be a planned series of speeches, interviews, etc., over the next two or three months by administration officials and other public figures talking about President Ford, what he is trying to do and what he has accomplished.

Robert Teeter

#2. This person should not be directly connected with the President Ford Committee nor should he be seen as a member of the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He should be someone like Laird or Rogers Morton.

Robert Teeter

#3. When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate, he actually pardoned Alexander Haig for the JFK assassination.

Tegan Mathis

#4. The standard rumor at the time was that Rumsfeld, as chief of staff, had persuaded President Ford to appoint George H.W. Bush as director of Central Intelligence, assuming that that got rid of a potential competitor for the presidency.

Bobby Ray Inman

#5. Vice-President Ford, possibly preparing for higher duties, assessed Kissinger's part in the Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement as the great diplomatic triumph of this century or perhaps any other.

Edwin Newman

#6. In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.

Henry A. Kissinger

#7. We have 51 golf courses in Palm Springs. He [President Ford] never decides which course he will play until after the first tee shot.

Bob Hope

#8. President Ford was a devoted, decent man of impeccable integrity who put service to his country before his own self interest. He helped heal our nation during a time of crisis, provided steady leadership and restored people's faith in the presidency and in government.

Mark Udall

#9. President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.

Nigel Hamilton

#10. The last time I played golf with President Ford he hit a birdie. And an eagle, a moose, an elk, an aardvark ...

Bob Hope

#11. We have the Terminator as governor, and we had an actor as president, so why shouldn't we have a fashion designer as a senator?

Tom Ford

#12. History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.

Bob Dole

#13. The harder you work, the luckier you are, and I worked like hell.

Gerald R. Ford

#14. One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.

Nicholas Kristof

#15. We want accountability. We just buried a president [President Gerald Ford] who did not hold another president [President Nixon] accountable for war crimes and that's why we're in Iraq right now. Our leaders who get us into these messes are the ones who need to be held accountable.

Cindy Sheehan

#16. President Gerald R. Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling. 'A pardon,' the excerpt said, 'carries an imputation of guilt,' and acceptance of a pardon is 'a confession of it.'

Scott Shane

#17. I went to Bergdorf Goodman as an assistant in the fashion office and that was really my first exposure into the world of retail. Dawn Mello was president at the time and she had just left Gucci where she found Tom Ford.

Roopal Patel

#18. I've had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.

Gerald R. Ford

#19. Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

Stewart Udall

#20. Mr. President, putting it bluntly, wouldn't we just be continuing a bloodbath that already exists in Cambodia if we voted the 222 million in aid?

Gerald R. Ford

#21. I do believe, with all my heart and mind and spirit, that I, not as President but as a humble servant of God, will receive justice without mercy if I fail to show mercy.

Gerald R. Ford

#22. Some say I was disappointed when President Obama won, and that is absolute nonsense.

Harold Ford Jr.

#23. Once upon a time we did not focus on a president's private life.

Tom Ford

#24. It's discouraging how hard it is for a President to slice away large chunks of a $305 billion budget.

Gerald R. Ford

#25. I would love to see Mr. (Henry) Ford in there, really. I don't know who started the idea that a President must be a Politician instead of a Business man. A Politician can't run any other kind of business. So there is no reason why he can run the U.S. That's the biggest single business in the World.

Will Rogers

#26. During the Reagan Administration, Bob Dole was present at a ceremony that included each living ex-president. Looking at a tableau of Ford, Carter and Nixon, Dole said, 'There they are: Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Evil.'

Al Franken

#27. President Gerald Ford was no intellectual, but he had served with distinction in combat as a naval gunnery officer and then as Congressman for a quarter century.

Nigel Hamilton

#28. I was very young, and I remember this heated, passionate argument and trying to figure out some place called Vietnam, something called a Watergate, and some guy named Gerald Ford who my dad knew who had just become president, and how all these things fit together.

Bill Huizenga

#29. When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#30. US President Gerald Ford's golf was so bad we thought he was a 'Hitman for the PGA!

Bob Hope

#31. The President has not created any Ford constituency, unique from that of any Republican President. The one exception to this is that he does show unique strength with young voters for a Republican.

Robert Teeter

#32. A coalition of groups is waging a massive propaganda campaign against the president of the United States. an all-out attack. Their aim is total victory for themselves and total defeat for him.

Gerald R. Ford

#33. Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon's exit and Mr. Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

Scott Shane

#34. In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.

Gerald R. Ford

#35. As President, I am determined to offer leadership to overcome our current economic problems. My goal is for jobs for all who want to work and economic opportunity for all who want to achieve.

Gerald R. Ford

#36. In the Bob Hope Golf Classic, the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.

Clive James

#37. Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.

Jimmy Carter

#38. I firmly believe that as voters come to learn more and more about John Kerry and learn more and more about his message that they're going to want a President who is willing to address the fact that we didn't have a post-war plan in Iraq.

Harold Ford Jr.

#39. We all obviously need others to look up to, and be inspirational to us. Ford did a great job as far as putting the presidency back where it belonged, getting the trust back after Nixon. And President Reagan has been one of the most influential presidents.

Steve Garvey

#40. Compromise is the oil that makes governments go.

Gerald R. Ford

#41. At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford's constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#42. I don't remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on.

Stewart Udall

#43. I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, so I ask you to confirm me with your prayers.

Gerald R. Ford

#44. Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word assassination.

Jeremy Scahill

#45. As America's head coach, President Obama needs to make some big and smart adjustments to jump-start economic growth and business investment, stimulate job creation, and get wages up for ordinary Americans.

Harold Ford Jr.

#46. He (former President Gerald Ford) made it very clear that he did not agree with the reasons President Bush laid out for the war, namely the belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or that there was some obligation that the United States or the president had to expand democracy.

Bob Woodward

#47. I look forward to their convention and look forward to hearing the President talk about what he will do for the next four years. He hasn't done it up to this point.

Harold Ford Jr.

#48. When he entered the Oval Office - by fate, not by design - Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?

Tom Brokaw

#49. A poet is a poet, whether he rides in a Ford or on a donkey; a sage is a sage, whether he plays golf in New Jersey or bathes in the Ganges, or prays in the desert; and a fool is a fool, whether he be a maharaja or a president of a post-war republic.

Ameen Rihani

#50. Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

Dan Jenkins

#51. 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