Years As President Quotes

#1. In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

Harry S. Truman

#2. After eight years as President I have only two regrets: that I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.

Andrew Jackson

#3. Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

Eugene Jarecki

#4. The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

#5. For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.)

Jon Meacham

#6. I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year.

Barack Obama

#7. For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Barack Obama

#8. Many years ago, it was my opportunity to serve as president of the Canadian Mission. There we had a branch with very limited priesthood. We always had a missionary presiding over the branch. I received a strong impression that we needed to have a member of the branch preside there.

Thomas S. Monson

#9. The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes.

Ed Gillespie

#10. Worst damnfool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected Vice-President of the United States. Should have stuck?as Speaker of the House? Gave up the second most important job in Government foreight long years as Roosevelt's spare tire.

John Nance Garner

#11. As son of a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was.

John Eisenhower

#12. As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

George H. W. Bush

#13. It's hard to say. I don't want to limit myself by saying one thing or another. I couldn't have imagined the path that these past five years have taken me, so I guess I'll just give a safe answer and say that I hope to be elected as the president of the United States in 2016.

Skylar Astin

#14. The law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years. And in my opinion - well, eight years is also long enough for an individual to serve as a representative for a specific Congressional district.

Michele Bachmann

#15. The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.

Barack Obama

#16. Bobby Kennedy's conduct toward Lyndon Johnson was childish and despicable. As the years went on, he displayed nasty, self-pitying, and messianic qualities that would have made him a dangerously authoritarian president.

Thomas Mallon

#17. As the refugee crisis unfolds across Europe, another is looming in our backyard. The number of children crossing the southwest border unaccompanied has quietly surged more than a year after President [Barack] Obama referred to the problem as a quote "urgent humanitarian situation."

Joy-Ann Reid

#18. No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.

Thomas Jefferson

#19. President Obama is the kind of politician who puts promises on the record, and then calls that the record. But we are four years into this presidency. The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy as we are living it.

Paul Ryan

#20. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

Philip Roth

#21. I enjoyed my new position as vice president, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for 10 years as a senator.

Harry S. Truman

#22. I started out as the president of a small college in Minnesota in 1947. And I had five years of experience at the college. Then we went to Los Angeles. And the press got to what we were doing. And I went to Boston, which is my next series of meetings. That was in 1950.

Billy Graham

#23. After four years as Administrator of the SBA, I have let President Obama know that I will not be staying for a second term. I will stay on until my successor is confirmed to ensure a smooth and seamless transition.

Karen Mills

#24. In Lincoln's mind, at least as Lamon interpreted the story, "the illusion was a sign." Both the president-elect and his wife believed it meant he would not only survive his term in office, but four years later win reelection to a second one, only to die before it ended.

Harold Holzer

#25. It is my hope that I can stand before you in two years and report back that our side, as well as the president's, found within us the ability to set differences aside, to provide relief to so many millions of Americans who simply want their life to work again.

Eric Cantor

#26. I think to a certain extent, Clinton may have expected as the senior president that Obama would've reached out to him and asked for his council; he's done that very little. So, I think the relationship has not been good over the years.

Ed Rollins

#27. As you know, John McCain is an older, white-haired man who has been in the Senate for over twenty years, voted for the Iraq War, and said Barack Obama did not have the experience to be president. I'm sorry, that's our intro for next week when Joe Biden is on, I got confused.

Jay Leno

#28. Bush met with former President Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is 76 years old, or as Democrats call him 'their bright new star of the future.'

David Letterman

#29. The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.

Richard M. Nixon

#30. President Obama has two years left as president. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets to appoint two new Kardashian husbands.

David Letterman

#31. Elect me as your congressman today, I promise you an Ilocano president in 20 years.

Ferdinand Marcos

#32. As president, I watched in wonder as Nelson Mandela had the remarkable capacity to forgive his jailers following 26 years of wrongful imprisonment - setting a powerful example of redemption and grace for us all.

George H. W. Bush

#33. If I can't take five years out to serve my country as president, then everything I've been singing about, like equal rights, doesn't mean anything.

Wyclef Jean

#34. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America's children as Hillary Clinton.

Donna Brazile

#35. [President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.

George Will

#36. One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned.

Ed Gillespie

#37. A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC), with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or so he claimed - which,

Mike Lofgren

#38. President Bush got an early Christmas gift. This week, President Bush was chosen as 'Person of the Year' by Time magazine. Not only that, Martha Stewart was chosen as person of the year by Doing Time magazine.

Conan O'Brien

#39. As the President has indicated, my life has been a life of travel - for 60 years constantly moving over the wide world on journeys which first and last have taken me to 83 countries, and, what is more significant, to most of them again and again.

John Raleigh Mott

#40. Unfortunately, these past few years, you can work hard, try to be as successful as possible, follow the rules, and President Barack Obama will do everything he can to stand in your way.

Nikki Haley

#41. The film 'Boyhood' won the Golden Globe for best drama. It follows one guy's journey over the course of 12 years - or as Mitt Romney calls that, 'running for president.'

Jimmy Fallon

#42. I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.

Edward M. Lerner

#43. The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.

Christina Romer

#44. I think [President George W. Bush] contributed very directly to the fact that the status of America as the world's only superpower lasted for 20 years at most.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#45. Back 12 years ago, when Dr. Mathews was president here, we had a plan that when I got ready to quit, we'd bring a certain guy in and he'd take over that day and I'd leave. But as time wore on, I realized that wouldn't have been good at all.

Bear Bryant

#46. I marched with you in the streets of Chicago to meet our immigration challenge. I fought with you in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform. And I will make it a top priority in my first year as President.

Barack Obama

#47. In 1972, I signed a union card for SEIU. And for the last 38 years, 14 as president, it's been my life. I've seen the most miraculous, spectacular things. But there's a time to learn, a time to lead and a time to leave.

Andy Stern

#48. I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#49. For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987.

Suze Orman

#50. All I'm saying, as a fan, is I'm tired of the same song for 30 years. Can't we change the message a little? You've arrived. You have a black president. Every white guy in a commercial doesn't have to be the idiot and every black guy in a rap song doesn't have to be God's gift to the world.

Bill Maher

#51. I would rather be an independent senator, governed by my own views, going for the good of the country, uncontrolled by any thing which mortal man can bring to bear upon me, than to be president of the United States, put there as presidents of the United States have been for many years past.

John C. Calhoun

#52. As prime minister, I worked closely with Ronald Reagan for eight of the most important years of all our lives. We talked regularly both before and after his presidency. And I have had time and cause to reflect on what made him a great president.

Margaret Thatcher

#53. Every two years for Congress, four years for President, illegal immigration comes out as a political issue.

Joe Arpaio

#54. It's tougher to be a football coach than the President of the United States. You've got four years as a president, and they guard you. A football coach doesn't have anyone to protect him when things go wrong.

Harry S. Truman

#55. Quanah Parker. As the years went by he became a shrewd businessman, built a large house, and successfully managed his farm and ranch. He traveled all over the country, and went to Washington to ride in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade.

Dee Brown

#56. A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it's been tested by recession and all manner of challenges - I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

Barack Obama