Quotes about Presidency

I think "No comment" is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again. I got it from Sumner Welles. To reporters at the Washington airport, after conferring with President Truman at the White House, February 12, 1946

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. . . . Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

He [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] died in harness, and we may well say in battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors and airmen who died side by side with ours and carrying out their tasks to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his.

Those who dismiss "revisionist" qualms about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as indulgences in peace-time sentimentality must count President Truman's own Chief of Staff among the bleeding hearts: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. . . . The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion , and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will have it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us."

In the US today, you are considered innocent until appointed to a public position by the President.

I would rather have written Fables in Slang than be President.

Will Rogers used to say he wouldn't run for president no matter how badly the country needed a comedian.

The Constitution does not leave to speculation who is to administer the laws enacted by Congress; the President, it says, "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". . . . The Brady Act effectively transfers this responsibility to thousands of [law enforcement officials] in the 50 States. . . . The power of the President would be subject to reduction, if Congress could act as effectively without the President as with him, by simply requiring state officers to execute its laws.

Many folks seem to know what the president should do - but not what they themselves should do.

The crime bill passed by the Senate would reinstate the Federal death penalty for certain violent crimes: assassinating the President; hijacking an airliner; and murdering a government poultry inspector.

Watson's answer to a question about competition in his first company meeting, 1914, as the new president, of the CTR (Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company), the company that was to become IBM: ". . . the only way that we want you men to handle the competition proposition is the only way we can afford to allow you men to handle it, that is, strictly on the merits of our goods. . . . You people when you come down to competition-must not do anything that's in restraint of trade, anything that will restrain the other fellow from selling his goods, anything that could be construed by anybody as unfair competition," he said, stammering in his earnestness. "You know, gentlemen, it is bad policy to do anything unfair with anybody, anywhere at any time, isn't it, in business or outside of business? No man ever won except in the one honest, fair and square way in which you men are working." The audience burst into applause, interrupting Watson again and again as he assured them that he would uphold fairness no matter what the competition did. . . . The spirit of the meeting quickened; and Watson, for the first time, began to take command.

When called to the Council of the Twelve, October 4, 1963, he said in the Salt Lake Tabernacle: I think of a little sister, a French-Canadian sister, whose life was changed by the missionaries as her spirit was touched. As she said good-by to me and my wife in Quebec, she said, "President Monson, I may never see the Prophet. I may never hear the Prophet. But President, far better, now that I am a member of this Church, I can obey the Prophet."

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.

In 27 years of reporting from Washington, I've never heard a President admit he made a mistake.

Ground Zero of American Political Debate Bipartisanship, Bill Clinton recently told The Washington Post that he wanted to "help flush the poison from the atmosphere." Which would be a beautiful thing... though some of us would miss David Bonior's press conferences. On the eve of his second inauguration, the Clinton made a failed attempt to declare ideological victory. He said that "the battles of his first term largely settled the debate over the role of government in his favor, clearing the way for a new season of cooperation". The President is very wrong. Even The Washington Post couldn't swallow the President's spin whole: "Yet even as Clinton predicted that Republicans will be more accommodating to his philosophy, his comments in a 55-minute Oval Office interview underscored the extent to which a president who arrived here four years ago with a vastly more expensive and partisan agenda himself has yielded to GOP priorities." That phrase, "yielded to GOP priorities," is just one rare sentence in one news article; in short, historians will record that: Conservatism has reordered every political reality of the day.

You have to remember that, right from the beginning, it was President Kennedy who said that it was politically unacceptable for us to leave those [Cuban] missile sites alone. He didn't say militarily, he said politically.

Under the doctrine of the separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.

Explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands: He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.

Patrick Henry opposed the federal Constitution not only because it lacked a Bill of Rights in its unamended form, but also because it would establish a "consolidated government" rather than a confederation of states. It is proper to note George F. Willison's caution that "[s]peeches by Henry and others, as reported, were approximations of what was said. . . . The 'shorthand gentlemen' of the convention did not attempt a verbatim report of everything that was said. Rather, they reported the lines of argument, the special points that were made, but their notes did manage to convey something of the style of the various speakers, picking up and preserving many of their more graphic phrases." (George F. Willison, Patrick Henry and His World, 1969) "The Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, Sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting - it squints towards monarchy. And does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your president may easily become king. . . . Where are your checks in this government? . . . I would rather infinitely - and I am sure most of this convention are of the same opinion - have a king, lords, and commons than a government so replete with such insupportable evils."

There seems to be a propensity in the human heart that leads men to find fault with their fellows who are placed in high positions. President Heber C. Kimball once illustrated this propensity thus: while conversing with a friend, he stooped and picked from the ground a twig, encrusted with mud, for it had recently been raining, and holding it up, said, "As long as this little twig remained upon the ground it attracted no attention, although it had as much mud clinging to it then as now, but you did not notice it. When I lift it from the earth, however, and hold it aloft, the mud is about all that you can see; it is with difficulty that you perceive the twig at all."

When, as President Joseph F. Smith said, we "catch a spark from the awakened memories of the immortal soul, "let us be quietly grateful. When of great truths we can say "I know," that powerful spiritual witness may also carry with it the sense of our having known before. With rediscovery, we are really saying "I know - again!"

For eight years I was sleeping with the President. If that doesn't give you special access, I don't know what does.

Just because you're married [to the president] doesn't mean you've given up your right to have and opinion.

I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated.

Mother Teresa Has Anti-Abortion Answer At a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington Feb. 3, Mother Teresa of Calcutta delivered the most startling and bold proclamation of truth to power I have heard in my more than 30 professional years in Washington. Before an audience of 3,000 - that included the president and his wife, the vice president and his wife and congressional leaders, among others - the 83-year old nun, who is physically frail but spiritually and rhetorically powerful, delivered an address that cut to the heart of the social ills afflicting America. She said that America, once known for generosity to the world, has become selfish. And she said that the greatest proof of that selfishness is abortion. Tying abortion to growing violence and murder in the streets, she said, "If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other? . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want." At that line, most of those in attendance erupted in a standing ovation, something that rarely occurs at these sedate events. At that moment, President Clinton quickly reached for his water glass, and Mrs. Clinton and Vice President and Mrs. Gore stared without expression at Mother Teresa. They did not applaud. It was clearly an uncomfortable moment on the dais. She then delivered the knockout punch: "Many people are very, very concerned with children in India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. "These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today - abortion, which brings people to such blindness." What? Abortion destroys peace and causes blindness toward the sick, the hungry and the naked? Abortion leads to wars between nations? Of course it does, if life is regarded so lightly and its disposal becomes so trivial, so clinical and so easy. Why should people or nations regard human life as noble or dignified if abortion flourishes? Why agonize about indiscriminate death in Bosnia when babies are being killed far more efficiently and out of the sight of television cameras? Mother Teresa delivered her address without rhetorical flourishes. She never raised her voice or pounded the lectern. Her power was in her words and the selfless life she has led. Even President Clinton, in his remarks that followed, acknowledged she was beyond criticism because of the life she has lived in service to others. At the end, she pleaded for pregnant women who don't want their children to give them to her: "I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child." She said she has placed over 3,000 children in adoptive homes from her Calcutta headquarters alone. She has answered the question, "Who will care for all of these babies if abortion is again outlawed?" Now the question is whether a woman contemplating abortion wishes to be selfish or selfless, to take life or to give life.

President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.

And I want you to know . . . that I have had the greatest support from President Bateman. I could coach as long as I want to and never felt any pressure to reach a decision.

Josiah Quincy, one-time mayor of Boston and president of Harvard University, recalled: "I will repeat an anecdote which I think Daniel Webster gave at a dinner, though, as I made no note of it, it is just possible that he told it in my presence at some later date. The conversation was running upon the importance of doing small things thoroughly and with the full measure of one's ability. This Webster illustrated by an account of some petty insurance case that was brought to him when a young lawyer in Portsmouth. Only a small amount was involved, and a twenty-dollar fee was all that was promised. "He saw that, to do his clients full justice, a journey to Boston, to consult the law library, would be desirable. He would be out of pocket by such an expedition, and for his time he would receive no adequate compensation. After a little hesitation he determined to do his very best, cost cost what it might. He accordingly went to Boston looked up the authorities, and gained the case. "Years after this, Webster, then famous, was passing through New York City. An important insurance case was to be tried the day after his arrival, and one of the counsel had been suddenly taken ill. Money was no object, and Webster was begged to name his terms and conduct the case. " 'I told them,' Mr. Webster, 'that it was preposterous to prepare a legal argument at a few hours' notice. They insisted, however, that I should look at the papers; and this after some demur, I consented to do. Well, it was my old twenty-dollar case over again, and as I never forget anything, I had all the authorities at my fingers' ends. The Court knew that I had no time to prepare, and was astonished at the range of my acquirements. So, you see, I was handsomely paid both in fame and money for that journey to Boston; and the moral is that good work is rewarded in the end, though, to be sure, one's self-approval should be enough.'"