Quotes About Presidents

Presidents make history but are also a product of it. And there are two kinds: transforming and transactional. Reagan was a transforming president. He made history.

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.

Middle names are kind of like vice presidents: It's a fine distinction and certainly an honor, but you're never not aware that someone else got the real job.

In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants.

I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.

Unlike Lyndon Johnson, who would later be swayed by the influence of Kennedy's advisors on Vietnam, Truman developed an independent view.

You could never trust a politician, Brown said, because "he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage." Presidents and members of Congress were, to him, "fiends clothed in human form," for they compromised with evil.

I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Every president since George Washington has taken executive privilege seriously. Every Republican president has.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced adversities that, in their times, seemed impregnable. Great presidents overcome great odds.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.

Nearly every president in the past 100 years has declared national monuments, from Teddy Roosevelt creating the Grand Canyon National Monument to George W. Bush preserving 10 islands and 140,000 square miles of ocean waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

As journalists, we cannot swallow the official line without question. We should challenge almost everything that dictators, presidents and officials say.

Many presidents have battled with Congress over their executive privilege and what it covers, but the idea that the debate is cause for impeachment is remarkably weak.

Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Weak presidents are neither respected nor electorally rewarded by their publics.

Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.

Ever since we've had electronic communications, and particularly during a time of war, presidents have authorized the electronic surveillance of the enemy.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to 'Demon Pass.'

Don't worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains... who is the next Ronald Reagan?