36th President Quotes

Instead of sitting on the sidelines, President Obama has made it clear that the US is ready to lead a global effort to combat climate change. ~ Valerie Jarrett

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy. ~ Robert Dallek

We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future. ~ Bill McKibben

The President is always abused. If he isn't, he isn't doing anything. ~ Harry S. Truman

I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was. ~ Harry Truman

Romney and Democratic rival President Obama have led their partisan backers down a trail of lies, negativity and vacuous policies that seem certain to guarantee an angry electorate four more years of gridlock. ~ Ron Fournier

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, someone else has solved them. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

It's not impossible for a woman - a Black woman - to become President. ~ Carol Moseley Braun

We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. ~ Harry Truman

Keep calm and ignore President Trump. ~ Steven Magee

Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's president that he'll take on, and I quote, 'the old boys network in Washington.' Now I'm not making this up. This is somebody who's been in Congress for twenty-six years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he's the one who's gonna' to take on the old boys network. The old boys network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting. Come, on! ~ Barack Obama

Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel. ~ Dick Durbin

Time magazine has selected their person of the year. Guess what, it's President-elect Barack Obama. Yeah, ironically, Ebony magazine announced their person of the year, and it's Ed Begley Jr. ~ Conan O'Brien

Pragmatism is cold comfort when millions of lives are in the balance," conceded Boucher. "It's a little like saying, 'Sorry, I can't rescue you from drowning until I finish waxing my car.'" The president chuckled ~ Jeremy Robinson

So China's president [Hu Jintao] meets, uh meets America's president. It's like President "Who?" meeting President "Huh?". ~ Jay Leno

Mr. President I am here to tell you we are not buying what you are selling in 2012. ~ Mia Love

Raising taxes is the last thing we should do amid the weakest economic recovery since World War II. Unfortunately, even if we avoid the full 'Taxmageddon' scenario, President Obama's health care law also contains a new surtax on investment that will take effect in 2013. ~ John Cornyn

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. ~ Andy Warhol

The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome - so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic. ~ Barack Obama

...9/11 was immediately understood not only as a tragedy for the United States and the city of New York but also as a global outrage, which took the lives of so many citizens from across the world. The headline emphasized the manner in which questions of identity were geographically and emotionally connected - the local (New York, Pennsylvania and Washington), the national (United States), and the global. Shortly afterwards, however, the event became reinscribed in overwhelmingly national terms - 'Attack on America'. Tragically, as former Vice President Al Gore has said, the United States has squandered that global goodwill and solidarity by its largely unilateral engagement in Iraq and other activities which have been judged by others to be inimical to international law, such as extraordinary rendition, detention camps, and the doctrine of pre-emption. We are certainly not all Americans now. ~ Klaus Dodds

As to the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it. ~ Martin Van Buren

Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably. ~ Jon Meacham

Say something," he said.

"What?" I mumbled, struggling to orient myself. "What?"

"Can you hear me? What day is it? Who's the president?"

"Yes, I don't know, and a horse's ass. ~ Jordan Castillo Price

I am very proud to come back, to speak on the disinterested effort we have made and I believe that, with all due respect, that the decisions we made, when we turned our final report over to President Johnson, will stand in history. ~ John Sherman Cooper

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair ... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life. ~ Dan Simmons

One great blemish in the popular mind of America and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust ... you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded ... Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment. ~ Charles Dickens

You can track elections by who was playing that president on 'SNL' at that time. There's the theory that the more likable or charismatic impression would help get the president elected. ~ Jordan Peele

I do not personally agree with some of the positions that Mr. Gonzales has advocated, but that should come as no surprise, because I do not agree with many of the proposals made by the man who nominated him, President Bush. ~ Daniel Inouye

I would give a lot to actually be able to glamour China into not wanting ivory. I can't even tell you how much I would give to be able to stop the illicit trade of Africa's wildlife, and to just look into the president of China's eyes and say, "You don't want this anymore, your country doesn't want this anymore," and have it be done. That would be great. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

Presidents come and go. History comes and goes, but principles endure. ~ Ronald Reagan

{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read.

Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create. ~ John Rucyahana

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex. ~ Cornel West