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

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

Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
~ Henry Brooks Adams

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

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.
~ David Broder

If presidents don't do it to their wives, they do it to the country.
~ Mel Brooks

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
~ Winston Churchill

I'd rather be right than President.
~ Henry Clay

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.
~ Alistair Cooke

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
~ Clarence Darrow

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
~ Bob Dylan

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

I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be President of the Argentines.
~ General Leopoldo Galtieri

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

If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
~ Vaclav Havel

The President is the people's lobbyist.
~ Hubert H. Humphrey

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I'm the only president you've got.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Frankly, I don't mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is.
~ Edward Kennedy