All Quotes

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
‐‐ Jill Lepore

Presidential campaigns are exhausting. Once they're over, we all heave a sigh of relief that we have our lives back, the constant emails and news reports no longer harangue us, and the topic even turns at times to something else entirely.
‐‐ Marianne Williamson

Presidential candidates don't chew gum.
‐‐ Theodore C. Sorensen

Presidential coverage used to be a very serious endeavor.
‐‐ Nina Easton

Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.
‐‐ Timothy Noah

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

Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
‐‐ Thomas Frank

Presidential money is almost like the housing bubble. It's growing at such an astronomical rate, you think it can't get any bigger.
‐‐ Chuck Todd

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

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

Presidents always want to do nice, noble, long-run things, and Congress is less keen to do so. We've seen that throughout the history of this country.
‐‐ Tyler Cowen

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day.
‐‐ Jonathan Dimbleby

Presidents and speakers for over 100 years had tried to pass affordable care for all Americans. It was challenged over and over. The Supreme Court declared it constitutional.
‐‐ Nancy Pelosi

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.
‐‐ Rick Perlstein

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.
‐‐ Thomas E. Mann

Presidents are nice people. They're nice, fun-loving people who have great jobs.
‐‐ Dan Jenkins

Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.
‐‐ Robert Dallek

Presidents can be judged by the company they choose to keep.
‐‐ Nina Easton

Presidents do not go into war lightly. It's a tremendous responsibility in making decisions, and I know Bush must deeply believe this is the only course.
‐‐ Julie Nixon Eisenhower

Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.
‐‐ Chinua Achebe

Presidents grow up in the White House. The times shape the man.
‐‐ Thomas Friedman

Presidents hate the press. They hate me most of the time.
‐‐ Helen Thomas

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
‐‐ Peggy Noonan

Presidents have the right to nominate their own cabinet secretaries. But their nominees don't have a right to confirmation. Senators have a constitutional duty to advise and consent to the appointment of all Cabinet officials. They should take that duty seriously.
‐‐ Gary Bauer

Presidents in both parties - from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan - have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity.
‐‐ Marco Rubio

Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.
‐‐ Richard Norton Smith

Presidents make their hard decisions and then abide forever with their mistakes and regrets.
‐‐ Nancy Gibbs

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.
‐‐ Robert Dallek

Presidents often disappoint, but first ladies rarely do.
‐‐ Kitty Kelley

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.
‐‐ Lyndon B. Johnson

Presidents seem to fall into two positive categories: they're one of us, or they're heroes. Both McCain and Obama probably see themselves as potential heroes - presidents who will be looked up to, not presidents everyday people will remark are 'just like me.'
‐‐ Chuck Todd

Presidents should do whatever possible and practical to encourage an environment of cooperation and bipartisanship. And they should maintain a certain level of decorum, diplomacy and decency. But, at the end of the day, presidents get elected to enact change.
‐‐ Mark McKinnon

Presidents tend to tinker, you know, and mess everything up.
‐‐ Pat Paulsen

Presidents Truman and Nixon left office under dark clouds of scandal and with abysmal levels of support, but with the passage of time, both have been reassessed far more positively.
‐‐ Monica Crowley

Presidents with strong nerves are decisive. They don't balk at unpopular decisions. They are willing to make people angry. Bush had strong nerves. Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not. Obama is a people pleaser, a trait not normally associated with nerves of steel.
‐‐ Fred Barnes

Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music - it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I'm really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis - he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn't impress me.
‐‐ Tony Bennett

Press conferences are good. I have my own philosophy about press conferences. I usually think that when they don't like the movie, they ask about other things.
‐‐ Joel Silver

Press coverage has been difficult for him. I did not set out to ensnare him with a child.
‐‐ Martin Bashir

Press coverage is nothing different. I mean, you win off the line, you win. It's that simple.
‐‐ Stefon Diggs

Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive.
‐‐ John Harwood

Press forward. Do not stop, do not linger in your journey, but strive for the mark set before you.
‐‐ George Whitefield

Press is basically a created story. It's all just stories.
‐‐ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Press junkets are incredibly annoying. You sit in a chair for three to six hours and have different journalists shuttle in for three minutes at a time, asking cheesy movie questions to get a quick sound bite - and that's their only objective. You can't really move or eat. You're just stuck there. It's pressure, constant pressure.
‐‐ Annabella Sciorra

Press on! for in the grave there is no work and no device. Press on! while yet you may.
‐‐ Nathaniel Parker Willis

Press on. Obstacles are seldom the same size tomorrow as they are today.
‐‐ Robert H. Schuller

Press TV is one of the few TV channels anywhere in the West that fairly presents the Palestinian case.
‐‐ Ken Livingstone

'Press Your Luck' was probably the most exciting because of the unpredictability of the game and how I won on one of the three days on the very last spin against all odds. It was one of those great unpredictable game show moments.
‐‐ Randy West

Pressed by the Obama administration and consumers, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsi, Campbell and General Mills, among others, have begun to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many products.
‐‐ Michael Moss

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.
‐‐ Robert Frost