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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
-Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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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.
-Walter Bagehot
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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.
-James Baker
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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.
-William Bolitho
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The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
-Jimmy Breslin
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Anyone that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
-David Broder
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Neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide.
-Warren Earl Burger
United States v. Nixon (1974)
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Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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I'd rather be right than President.
-Henry Clay
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My own participation in the campaign was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on the seventh of July. He was a boy of much promise, proficient in his studies, with a scholarly mind, who had just turned sixteen.
He had a remarkable insight into things.
The day I became President he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, if my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field, Calvin replied, If my father were your father, you would....
We do not know what might have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President, he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds.In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.
When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.
The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do.
I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.
-Calvin Coolidge
(autobiography)
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Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.
-Calvin Coolidge
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When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
-Clarence Darrow
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You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the oval office. ... It's a disease I came to call Ovalitis.
-John Dean
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But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
-Bob Dylan
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Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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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.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be President of the Argentines.
-General Leopoldo Galtieri
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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.
-David R. Gergen
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It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.
-Alexander Hamilton
from No. 8, The Federalist
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If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
-Vaclav Havel
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The President is the people's lobbyist.
-Hubert Humphrey
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No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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I'm the only president you've got.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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Books about Presidency
