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Frankly, I don't mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is.
-Edward Kennedy
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Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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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.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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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.
-Florence King
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A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
-Max Lerner
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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.
-Abraham Lincoln
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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.
-P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
-J. R. Pole
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We're an ideal political family, as accessible as Disneyland.
-Maureen Reagan
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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.
-Ronald Reagan
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The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918
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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.
-Robert E. Sherwood
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In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
-Adlai Stevenson
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The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and his imprecise talk about new politics and honesty in government, is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.
McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
-Hunter S. Thompson
from Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt
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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.
-James Thurber
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Being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.
-Harry S Truman
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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.
-Harry S Truman
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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.
-Harry S Truman
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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.
-Harry S Truman
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All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
-Harry S Truman
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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.
-John Updike
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When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.
-Gore Vidal
Armageddon? (essay), 1987
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I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.
-Walt Whitman
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In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
-Oscar Wilde
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Books about Presidency
