But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.
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There are a lot of bad things happening right now in the Bush White House. Obviously, leadership at the highest level is very important to investors feeling comfortable about making investment decisions. This is probably the darkest or the lowest point in the Bush presidency.
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My own participation in the campaign was delayed by the death of my son Calvin, which occurred on the seventh of July. He was a boy of much promise, proficient in his studies, with a scholarly mind, who had just turned sixteen. He had a remarkable insight into things. The day I became President he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, if my father was President I would not work in a tobacco field, Calvin replied, If my father were your father, you would.... We do not know what might have happened to him under other circumstances, but if I had not been President, he would not have raised a blister on his toe, which resulted in blood poisoning, playing lawn tennis in the South Grounds.In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him. The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do. I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.
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The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize
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I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
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The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.
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I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.
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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.
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I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first ... Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
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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.
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Neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide.
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I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in m...
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The Vice Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have come to the conclusion that the 22nd Amendment limiting the presidency to two terms was a mistake. Shouldn't the people have the right to vote for someone as many times as they want to vote for him
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The Vice Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.
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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.
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The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his pea...
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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.
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We have entered the era of the 'imperial' former presidency with lavish libraries, special staffs and benefits, around-the-clock Secret Service protection for life and other badges of privilege.
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Let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we are going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.
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I think the presidency is an institution over which you have temporary custody.
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Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
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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.
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The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
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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.
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A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
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