Presidential Quotes

#1. When Uganda got debt relief in 1999, the first item President Museveni bought was a presidential jacket for himself.

George Ayittey

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

Marianne Williamson

#3. Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

George F. Will

#4. In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.

Elliott Abrams

#5. I will not step down, I will not resign, ... I will work to the end of my term in office under the constitution. In the year 2000, there will be presidential elections under the constitution and I will not run in those elections.

Boris Yeltsin

#6. I don't know if the presidential candidates are running for the White House or Animal House.

Bob Hope

#7. WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.

Noam Chomsky

#8. 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

#9. "Is it any wonder somebody like Donald Trump is racing through the presidential primary process?"

Rush Limbaugh

#10. The lead singer of Creed says he won't endorse President Obama. Well that settles it
Obama will not win the 1998 presidential election.

Stephen Colbert

#11. This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign.

Charles Krauthammer

#12. 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

#13. We got a lot of energy. She certainly doesn't look presidential to me, Hillary [Clinton]. I don't think you get to look less presidential actually than Hillary.

Donald Trump

#14. The 60th seed at Wimbledon gets a chance at Center Court. The 60th seed in the NCAA gets a chance to go to the Final Four. But the third seed [in presidential politics] is shut out.

Ralph Nader

#15. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.

Helen Thomas

#16. Expressing reverence for Reagan has been almost a requirement for Republican presidential candidates since 1988, but Mr. Walker has taken to it like an apostle to his creed.

Anonymous

#17. The people of South Carolina support conservatives who are trying to push real change, and the people of South Carolina expect their presidential candidates to back them up when they show courage.

Nikki Haley

#18. If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.

Bill Gates

#19. The 2008 Democratic presidential candidates would be wise to note that unwarranted negativism is dangerous and badly underestimates the strengths of the American people to adapt to and prosper with change.

Bernard L. Schwartz

#20. Presidential campaign observer Teddy White on the second Kennedy-Nixon debate in which the candidates spoke from separate television studios: It was as if, separated by comments from his adversary, Richard Nixon was more at ease and could speak directly to the nation that lay between them.

David Pietrusza

#21. I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#22. A lot of factors go into choosing a vice-presidential nominee.

Marco Rubio

#23. 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

#24. We teachers break our bodies to give you a shirt that you will wear in the future, to conferences, to presidential speeches, to autograph signings. That is up to you and if you can do that for at least in a little thank to us. Then thank you, thank you all.

Pedro A. Perez Raymond

#25. Weed was confident that the British would have no idea anything was amiss with Seward's presidential aspirations and would treat him with the respect afforded to the next leader of the Americans.

Anonymous

#26. Donald Trump isn't really running for president, come on! This is obviously a new reality show, Celebrity Presidential Apprentice. It ends with the incompetent celebrity being berated, humiliated, then unceremoniously fired.

Michael R. Burch

#27. I think that it's a vital moment now for Russian democracy to convince people that it's only our actions, our joined actions and protests that could force Kremlin to reconsider its plans to abolish presidential elections.

Garry Kasparov

#28. I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.

Paula Poundstone

#29. We are all encouraged that Bush appears, really for the first time in his experience on the stage of presidential politics, relaxed. His comfort is our comfort.

John Dean

#30. Decisions made in Washington are more important to us than those made here in Dar es-Salaam. So, maybe my people should be allowed to vote in American presidential elections.

Julius Nyerere

#31. Of course nothing is ever done about a [presidential] commission report, except, they say, once a man at the state prison for the criminally insane actually read one once clear through. Then he did something about it. He made a bonfire that lasted a week.

Will Rogers

#32. 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

#33. The author commented that John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign team worked like a band of brothers, while Richard Nixon's campaign team worked like a band of brothers in law under the direction of a quarrelsome aunt.

David Pietrusza

#34. The night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's 'The Making of the President,' the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting.

Michael Hastings

#35. On the human rights side, administration policy has been marked by indifference. When the people of Iran flooded the streets to protest the theft of their presidential election in June 2009, President Obama was silent for 11 days.

Elliott Abrams

#36. Responded with a presidential note describing how Washington defined a "base." Work on the new facility was halted,

Walter Isaacson

#37. Attack politics costs us dearly in terms of insight into the candidates. In a presidential campaign, the focus is so tight that the politicians are afraid to say anything that hasn't been scripted.

Jack Germond

#38. 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

#39. The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.

Candice Millard

#40. I wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

George McGovern

#41. I saw that on Small Business Saturday, the president went shopping at a bookstore and bought 17 books, including "The Laughing Monsters," "Being Mortal," and "Heart of Darkness." Or as the cashier put it, "You OK, man? Maybe a little 'Chicken Soup for the Presidential Soul?'

Jimmy Fallon

#42. The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.

Ada Louise Huxtable

#43. One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline - whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates - is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.

Josh Waitzkin

#44. Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.

Thomas Frank

#45. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was 'light-skinned' and lacked a 'Negro dialect.'

Monica Crowley

#46. Perhaps the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair ... it would be difficult to imagine a man less fit to guide the state with honor and safety through the stormy times that marked the opening of the present century.

Theodore Roosevelt

#47. The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

Robert McChesney

#48. Republican presidential hopeful Mike Hucka-BS is attacking actress Natalie Portman for getting pregnant without being married. It could get a little awkward if he runs into Sarah and Bristol Palin at Fox News.

Jay Leno

#49. Presidential leadership needn't always cost money. Look for low- and no-cost options. They can be surprisingly effective.

Donald Rumsfeld

#50. Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)

Charles Krauthammer

#51. But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.

Thomas E. Mann

#52. President Obama is a big supporter of keeping the Internet open. During his presidential campaign, he pledged his support to net neutrality repeatedly.

Marvin Ammori

#53. In 2006, I entered the presidential palace in the main square of La Paz as the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Our government, under the slogan 'Bolivia Changes,' is committed to ending the colonialism, racism and exclusion that many of our people lived under for many centuries.

Evo Morales

#54. You're a trivial part in a trivia game.
Now what's your aim? A presidential campaign?
Like Ross Perot? He lost it though ...
But he got a billion in tha bank fo' sho'!

Aceyalone

#55. 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

#56. Americans have not had a presidential choice since 1932. Roosevelt was our man; every president since Roosevelt has been our man.

Harold Wallace Rosenthal

#57. Like NASCAR race drivers or PGA golfers, why not require each of the [US presidential] candidates to cover their clothing, briefcases and staff with the logo patches of their corporate sponsors?

Jim Hightower

#58. When Gingrich attacked CNN's John King for bringing up his alleged proposal of an open marriage to his second wife, Gingrich accused him of lowering the level of discourse in a presidential debate, suggesting that such a discussion is unworthy of consideration by voters.

Robert Dallek

#59. When you explain to people how this country [US] works, because we have a presidential single member district system there is no way to start a third party without injuring your friends that is if you start a liberal party you are going to elect conservatives and vice versa.

William Domhoff

#60. He's got it all. The lineage, the resources, the perfect presidential hair. He'd be crazy not to run.

Cristin Terrill

#61. Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.

Alfie Kohn

#62. In the summer of 1952, when I was 30, the Army assigned me to an infantry unit fighting in Korea. Meanwhile, though, there was other news in my family: My father had become the Republican presidential nominee. As an ambitious young major, I refused any offers for other assignments.

John Eisenhower

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. One of the presidential campaigns unveiled more of an infrastructure in place for the next contest than was previously thought to be present, with a spokesperson saying that one of the campaign's strengths is that it does not make an effort to draw attention to with every asset.

New York Times

#66. I met Jon Lovett, who was just coming off of three years of being a presidential speech writer and had just arrived here to be a comedy writer in Hollywood. I thought he was super green, in terms of this world, but he knows so much about the world that we're attempting to write about.

Josh Gad

#67. When we get a chance to take part in elections, I am ready to fight for leading positions, including in the presidential vote.

Alexei Navalny

#68. Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Walter Bagehot

#69. I injured myself politically when I took on Jesse Jackson' in the 1988 presidential campaign. I was too strident. I didn't recognize the emotional tie that he had with all black voters.

Ed Koch

#70. Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush has released all of his emails. I'd like to release all of my emails. I've got nothing but emails about low-cost funerals and Viagra.

David Letterman

#71. We need an attorney general for the people, not a presidential protector and puppet of the administration.

John Barrasso

#72. When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

John W. Gardner

#73. I think we may be seeing the beginnings of a resurgence of civic-mindedness in this country. Hopefully the younger generations, which came out in record numbers during the last presidential election, will pass their enthusiasm on to their children.

Sandra Day O'Connor

#74. The "evils of faction" theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the "muckrakers" at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton's contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.

Edward S. Greenberg

#75. Political pandering comes in all shapes and sizes, but every four years the presidential primary bring us in contact with its purest form - praising ethanol subsidies amid the corn fields of Iowa.

John Sununu

#76. By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Gore Vidal

#77. President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.

Maureen Dowd

#78. Presidential primary debates are an important part of our political process. But the media has wrested complete control from the parties and candidates over everything, including the number, the format, the qualifications, and the moderators. And they've become a circus.

Mark McKinnon

#79. 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

#80. Natural Texas politicians make terrible, terrible presidential candidates. Phil Gramm, I remember the 'Phil Gramm for President' campaign. I thought that was the worst thing in the history of the world, but Rick Perry was possibly worse.

Gail Collins

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. When contemplating General Eisenhower winning the Presidential election, Truman said, Hell sit here, and hell say, Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ikeit wont be a bit like the Army. Hell find it very frustrating.

Harry S. Truman

#84. 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

#85. We ... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

Nelson Shanks

#86. I work really long hours and work a lot and have done press tours and junkets, but there is nothing like a presidential campaign that I have experienced before ... I think at one point we visited three different cities in one state in 12 hours. It's exhausting.

America Ferrera

#87. Presidential power is the power to persuade.

Richard Neustadt

#88. Hillary Clinton's record in office is dreadful. Her ideas are dreadful. They will make us less safe. So, but there is no way I'm going to vote for a guy who is just totally uninformed, un-presidential as Donald Trump is.

Bret Stephens

#89. From 4 to 6 percent of the presidential office is not in administration but in morals, politics, and spiritual leadership . He has to guide a people in the greatest adventure ever undertaken on the planet.

William Allen White

#90. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.

Jon Voight

#91. As the 2016 presidential race kicks off, candidates on both sides of the aisle are promising to stand up for the middle class. Voters deserve to know that anyone who champions Obamacare cannot honestly say she or he is also a champion of middle-class Americans.

John Barrasso

#92. What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.

Nigel Hamilton

#93. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign has raised $40 million in the last week. When he heard that, Rubio said, 'Hey, any chance I can drop out of the race and just keep the 40 million?'

Jimmy Fallon

#94. My first presidential primary vote was for Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Gunton

#95. In every election cycle that I can recall, there comes a moment - or a few - where charges of elitism and claims of commonness are wielded by presidential candidates like a sword and shield: 'Vote for me 'cause I'm one of you. It's the other guy who's out of touch.'

John Ridley

#96. 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

#97. Most major domestic programs got more money this year, and they're used to reflect the priorities of the upcoming year. One good example is, the Secret Service is getting $268 extra dollars because it's a presidential election year and the agency's going to be under more demands.

Susan Davis

#98. Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

Helen Thomas

#99. Presidential Democratic front-runner Howard Dean admitted to Chris Matthews on the 'Hardball' show that he got out of the draft because of a bad back. He had a curvature of the spine. Apparently it curved too far to the left.

Jay Leno

#100. 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