"Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic."

Adams, Henry Brooks on President
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"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."

Bagehot, Walter on President
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"You don't need to know who's playing on the White House tennis court to be a good president. A president has many roles."

Baker, James on President
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"Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unfrocked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods."

Bolitho, William on President
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"Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office."

Broder, David on President
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"If presidents don't do it to their wives, they do it to the country."

Brooks, Mel on President
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"Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it."

Churchill, Winston on President
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"I'd rather be right than President."

Clay, Henry on President
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"All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah."

Cooke, Alistair on President
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"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."

Darrow, Clarence on President
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"But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."

Dylan, Bob on President
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"The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on President
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"I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be President of the Argentines."

Galtieri, General Leopoldo on President
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"I don't have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don't think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that's the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing."

Gergen, David R. on President
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"If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President."

Havel, Vaclav on President
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"The President is the people's lobbyist."

Humphrey, Hubert H. on President
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"No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it."

Jefferson, Thomas on President
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"Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time."

Johnson, Lyndon B. on President
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"I'm the only president you've got."

Johnson, Lyndon B. on President
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"Frankly, I don't mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is."

Kennedy, Edward on President
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"As far as the job of President goes, its rewarding and I've given before this group the definition of happiness for the Greeks. I'll define it again: the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, that the Presidency provides some happiness."

Kennedy, John F. on President
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"We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference."

King, Florence on President
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"A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride."

Lerner, Max on President
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"The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts."

Lincoln, Abraham on President
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"When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Nixon, Richard M. on President
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"In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character."

O'Rourke, P. J. on President
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"A president, however, must stand somewhat apart, as all great presidents have known instinctively. Then the language which has the power to survive its own utterance is the most likely to move those to whom it is immediately spoken."

Pole, J. R. on President
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"We're an ideal political family, as accessible as Disneyland."

Reagan, Maureen on President
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"But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret."

Reagan, Ronald on President
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"All Coolidge had to do in 1924 was to keep his mean trap shut, to be elected. All Harding had to do in 1920 was repeat Avoid foreign entanglements. All Hoover had to do in 1928 was to endorse Coolidge. All Roosevelt had to do in 1932 was to point to Hoover."

Sherwood, Robert E. on President
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"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."

Stevenson, Adlai E. on President
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"From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing."

Thurber, James on President
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"Being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed."

Truman, Harry S on President
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"Some of the Presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great Presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that."

Truman, Harry S on President
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"The president is the representative of the whole nation and he's the only lobbyist that all the one hundred and sixty million people in the country have."

Truman, Harry S on President
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"When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency."

Truman, Harry S on President
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"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence."

Updike, John on President
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"In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever."

Wilde, Oscar on President
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