Presidential Candidate Quotes

#1. Every election, a presidential candidate inevitably proposes a new cabinet agency. The idea is that this is the only way to solve a particular problem. Just create more government.

Christopher Buckley

#2. 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

#3. (Harry Reid) was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

Harry Reid

#4. The vice presidential candidate tends to be a bit of an afterthought.

Mary Cheney

#5. As Barry Commoner, US biologist and 1980 presidential candidate, formulated it in his Four Laws of Ecology:
Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.
Nature knows best.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Kennedy Warne

#6. 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

#7. I believe Sarah Palin is a true statesman, whose experience as a failed vice presidential candidate, half-term governor and eight-episode reality star has fully prepared her to take control of our nuclear arsenal.

Stephen Colbert

#8. The first and most essential quality of a presidential candidate, as Averell Harriman once pointed out, is that he should lust for the job - he should want it more than all things, with a passion surpassing all emotion and probably even all principle.

Theodore H. White

#9. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Charles Bukowski

#10. 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

#11. On a pure entertainment level, if I'm going to choose to listen to a presidential candidate speak on a Saturday night, it's going to be Donald Trump over Bernie Sanders by a landslide!

Jerrod Carmichael

#12. 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

#13. When the Founding Fathers arrived here in Philadelphia to forge a new nation, they didn't come as Democrats or Republicans or to nominate a presidential candidate. They came as patriots who feared party politics.

Michael Bloomberg

#14. 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

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

Marianne Williamson

#16. During a recent event at a restaurant called Tommy's Country Ham House in South Carolina, presidential candidate Ben Carson delivered a speech right after he lost his front tooth. Which still left him with more teeth than everyone combined at Tommy's Country Ham House.

Jimmy Fallon

#17. In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine.

Robert Dallek

#18. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump is going to get tough questions from the press and has to answer them.

Randy Falco

#19. Remember this presidential candidate can count.

Herman Cain

#20. A libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.

L. Neil Smith

#21. In a new issue of Esquire magazine, they revealed that before he was married to Teresa Heinz, Senator John Kerry dated Morgan Fairchild, Michelle Phillips, Catherine Oxenberg and Dana Delany. Finally a Democratic presidential candidate with good taste in women.

Jay Leno

#22. A presidential candidate's great desire is to be seen as pragmatic, and they hope their maneuvering and shifting will be seen in pursuit of some higher purpose. It doesn't mean they are utterly insincere.

Robert Dallek

#23. When a presidential candidate is publicly requesting help from the Russians, you know that there is something seriously going wrong in the USA.

Steven Magee

#24. They say John Kerry is the first Democratic presidential candidate in history to raise $50 million in a three-month period. Actually, that's nothing. He once raised $500 million with two words: 'I do.'

Jay Leno

#25. Barack Obama may be black, but John McCain is the first Albino presidential candidate: he's completely see-through!

George Lopez

#26. We vote for a presidential candidate without saying, Why not run the country for a month and then we'll see .

Seth Godin

#27. The Republican presidential candidate [Donald Trump] provoked condemnation from leaders in both parties and around the world. He did that by proposing to bar all Muslims from entering the United States.

Steve Inskeep

#28. In 1989, shortly before his death, he campaigned for Peronist presidential candidate Carlos Menem.185

Uki Goni

#29. A presidential candidate who appeared not to understand or respect the parameters of responsible foreign policy conduct would not get the political support necessary to win the office.

Michael Mandelbaum

#30. Aside from Donald Trump, polls find [Hillary] Clinton to be the least-liked presidential candidate in recent history.

Tamara Keith

#31. I try to avoid saying anything positive about any presidential candidate for fear that if I actually like them then I will kill their campaign.

Jack Abramoff

#32. In a new poll of Democratic voters, presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee came in with zero percent support. Or in other words: We're all tied with presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee.

Jimmy Fallon

#33. 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

#34. Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was ... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain.

Jeff Greenfield

#35. No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.

Ralph Nader

#36. I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today.

David Herbert Donald

#37. The Democrats current crudeness is a function of their desperation, and the imminent ratification of Howard Dean, the least charming presidential candidate in recent memory, as their party chairman only serves to punctuate the problem.

Joe Klein

#38. I regret that a private comment I made to the vice presidential candidate made it through the public airways.

George W. Bush

#39. What sort of job can you hold in America in which it is safe to hold the personal conviction that same-sex marriage is wrong? The answer: there is no such job. Except Democratic presidential candidate in 2008. Then you're fine.

Ben Shapiro

#40. Every now and then, a presidential candidate surprises us with a truly human and honest moment.

Ron Fournier

#41. Presidential candidate Donald Trump had a meeting with Ted Cruz. He said he does not know why he agreed to fly to New York to meet Ted Cruz and then he promised to bring that kind of leadership to the Oval Office.

Conan O'Brien

#42. Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.

P. J. O'Rourke

#43. No Republican presidential candidate is a viable option for pro-choice voters of any political philosophy - Democrat, Republican or otherwise.

Christine Pelosi

#44. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to claim that there are "two Americas," the rich and the poor. If Democrats have their way, there will be two Latin Americas, both of them poor. You're living in one of them right now.

Ann Coulter

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

Eileen Myles

#46. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has taken American politics by storm.

Sean Hannity

#47. It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.

Richard Dawkins

#48. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with.

John Updike

#49. As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal.

Camille Paglia

#50. 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

#51. The Boston Globe is reporting that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry used to date actress Morgan Fairchild but it didn't work out. Apparently she couldn't handle dating someone with bigger hair then she had.

Jay Leno

#52. Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials - including Dick Cheney himself - has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced.

Glenn Greenwald

#53. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney's is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

Jodi Kantor

#54. When Obama was first proposed as a presidential candidate in 2007, the nation failed to have a meaningful debate concerning the serious constitutional issue of electing someone whose father was not a U.S. citizen.

Aaron Klein

#55. I would support a Presidential candidate who pledged to take the following steps: ... At the end of the war in the Persian Gulf, press for a comprehensive Middle East settlement and for a 'new world order' based not on Pax Americana but on peace through law with a stronger U.N. and World Court.

George McGovern

#56. The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.

Alexandra Robbins

#57. Presidential candidate Howard Dean is now being attacked for dodging the draft. I never knew this about the guy - but now I know this guy is presidential material.

David Letterman

#58. One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

Harold Holzer

#59. When you have a 12-minute debate over whether lipstick on a pig refers to a demeaning comment about the vice presidential candidate, you know we're not talking about health reform, we're not talking about energy policy, we're not talking about balancing the budget. And you know, it's fairly stupid.

Newt Gingrich

#60. The vice presidential candidate does not usually make much difference at the polls. But that may be changing as voters become more aware that the understudy must be ready to take over if needed.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#61. When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

Lawrence Lessig

#62. In an interview, former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan said he does not have a racist bone in his body. However, he admitted he has three sexist bones and his spine is homophobic.

Conan O'Brien

#63. Today, possible presidential candidate Donald Trump released his birth certificate. It lists his eyes as blue and his hair as ridiculous.

Conan O'Brien

#64. [When asked, as a prospective Presidential candidate, whether she had ever committed adultery:] No. But then most congresswomen don't have 25-year-old lifeguards throwing themselves at their feet around this place.

Patricia Schroeder

#65. No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.

Dick Morris

#66. Sooner or later, I need to begin to do what any candidate does in a presidential race; I need to begin to win.

Lamar Alexander

#67. The point of a presidential campaign is to put the candidate through the ringer: to force him to get banged up by his opponents and the press, and to have to answer the difficult and uncomfortable questions, be investigated, and learn the thrust and parry of political swordplay.

Monica Crowley

#68. In most presidential elections, the taller candidate wins.

Susan Estrich

#69. It is true that all of the current presidential candidates once denied that they had any intention of running. But the fact that I am also a liar, doesn't make me a candidate.

Pat Paulsen

#70. In 2008, Barack Obama was the electoral equivalent of the Hula Hoop; a political Pet Rock; a craze, a fad, an irrational gadget. The latest have-to-have, must-vote-for candidate.

Mondo Frazier

#71. A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

E.B. White

#72. During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.

Charles Krauthammer

#73. From 1976, Judy to 1996, we had six presidential elections. And it was run under the Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1974. In all six of them, every candidate agreed to limits of what he could collect in contributions and what he could spend in seeking a nomination. And they all abided by it.

Mark Shields

#74. Um, yeah. For instance, take, you know, take, for instance, the issue of -- I'm drawing a blank, and I hate it when I do that, particularly on television.
-- potential McCain VP candidate Mark Sanford, asked on CNN to name differences in economic policy between Bush and McCain

Mark Sanford

#75. 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

#76. [O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn't much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate's mood.

George Packer

#77. I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.

Jesse Jackson