Presidency Quotes

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Presidents are selected, not elected.”
― Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got lots of numbers in it.”
― George W. Bush

“Conventional belief holds that after triumphing over a mid-career bout with polio, FDR went on to serve two vigorous terms as gov- ernor of New York and three-plus more as president of the United States, succumbing unexpectedly to a stroke on April 12, 1945. In truth, Franklin spent those eventful twenty-four years battling swarms of maladies including polio’s ongoing crippling effects, life-threatening gastrointestinal bleeding, two incurable cancers, severe cardiovascular disease, and epilepsy.”
― Steven Lomazow, FDR Unmasked: 73 Years of Medical Cover-ups That Rewrote History

“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it. The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The Nazis are not justified by saying,

Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?!

Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic!

And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president.”
― Joseph Bayly

“I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk. ”
― William Howard Taft

“All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.”
― Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

“he made his declaration two weeks before Easter in the most public fashion possible for the age: on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. 'I'm in favor of disarmament and I'm in favor of trust,' he [Billy Graham] said. 'I'm in favor of having agreements not only to reduce but to eliminate. Why should any nation have atomic bombs?”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelist who edited Sojourners, said the pivot on arms control was the direct result of preaching overseas. 'Any good preacher, any good evangelist, in order to speak to people, you have to fall in love with your congregation. So he's speaking to these huge crowds in Eastern Europe and he [Billy Graham] realizes, 'My country has nuclear weapons targeted on these people with whom I'm falling in love, who I want to bring to Jesus Christ, and I have a problem with that.' I don't think he ever had questions about nuclear policy until he went to the Eastern bloc.”
― Nancy Gibbs

“I just didn't hang around the White House any more after Nixon ... Watergate changed me a little bit along that line." - Billy Graham”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“he would never, whatever his political bent, turn down any president who needed his help or asked him to dinner”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Two days after the Grahams departed, on November 4, students in Tehran took sixty-six American diplomats hostage and showed no sign of giving them up. The Iranian government, such as it was, was either unable or unwilling to step in. It was, Rosalynn wrote later, 'the beginning of the end'.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“And, in a larger sense, Graham was soon vindicated. Within just a few months, he received invitations to preach in the nations that were then known as Czechoslovakia and East Germany - trips that would turn out to be genuine crusades in countries desperate for Christian ministry. It had not been easy to watch, but Graham had wedged his foot in the door. And he would help kick it wide open over the next few years. p. 275”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“When the invitation came for Graham to return to the Soviet Union two years later in 1984, he would get the chance to lead a crusade through four cities and give twenty-three sermons in twelve days. By then, he knew how to order his steps.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“I loved those two people.

- Graham on the Clintons”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“In September 1959, Graham was about to begin a crusade in Little Rock. ... 'A lot of business people in Little Rock were worried about some sort of great encounter," Clinton recalled later, 'because racial tensions were very high. And they asked Billy Graham to agree to give this crusade to a segregated audience. And he said if they insisted on that he would not come, that they were all children of God, he wanted to lead everyone to Christ. He would not do it.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“You know, I'm still on somebody's list somewhere for giving him next to no money,' Clinton joked later, ' but it was a pretty good chunk of what I had.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“The Graham family's roots to North Korea were considerable: Ruth had lived in Pyongyang as a teenager”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Clinton was, Graham told King [Larry] 'one of the most charismatic people I've ever met.' - p. 315”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Oh, I would just love to talk to you sometime, maybe we could have lunch,' she recalled. But Graham politely declined, explaining to the governor's wife that he did not dine alone with women - be they single or married. 'Oh, well, I'm sorry,' Hillary said. 'Maybe we could have a lot of people there.' Graham replied that he would think about it. ... And so five people sat down at a found table in Little Rock's ornate Capital Hotel that fall.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“He would say, 'I have a strong wife, you know, people don't realize how strong Ruth is.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“She held my hand the whole time in our private time,' Graham recalled. 'And she was just so sweet. She is different from the Hillary you see in the media. There is a warm side to her”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“The immense boom cameras swept over the heads of the crowd like some skeletal dinosaurs ... They alone could capture the scale of the crowd.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“there were places he could not go without the power of the presidency behind him to open doors. That was the practical benefit of these friendships, and its impact was felt literally all around the world.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Acknowledgments: ... From the start, we also benefitted from the support of Time Inc. editors”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“After a few minutes Truman went back inside the White House, so he could call his mother and personally deliver the news: World War II was over. ("That was Harry," ninety-two-year-old Mamma Truman said after hanging up. "Harry's such a wonderful man... I knew he'd call.")”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.

–Abraham Lincoln”
― Jeff J. Horn

“The purpose of the presidency is not the glorification of the president. It is the unification of the American people.”
― Pete Buttigieg