Top 1026 Presidential Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

You can't be what you can't see, so it's harder for women to say, "I'm going to be a [presidential] candidate," so we need to go to women who would be good candidates and say, "You would be a good candidate and I'll help you." It's not a passive question, it's not when will it happen, but an active question, when will we make it happen?

To the American People: Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world." ~ Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), American president. Presidential message (December 25, 1927).

Let me just say that anything that I say about what's going on at Justice is pure speculation. Obviously, you know, I'm just going based on my experience as the attorney general, but, yeah, surprised because typically you don't talk about investigations. And it kind of surprised me that that letter went out, and I suppose that the reason for it is because we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. But nonetheless, I think it would be contrary to typical protocol.

It's extraordinary to me - you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly, through bad trade deals, destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China's entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal - every single one of those.

When 3 million more people vote for a presidential candidate, but that candidate still loses, the system sucks. Period. It's broken. I think it's broken if the candidate loses by one vote and still wins. Losing by 3 million votes, but still winning the election, is preposterous.

John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean has completely changed the presidential race around. Now instead of the rich white guy from Yale who lives in the White house facing off against the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Vermont, he may have to face the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Massachusetts. It's a whole different game.

Some countries have a parliamentary republic, some are presidential republics and some are still monarchies, but no one sees them as not being democratic. In some countries regional leaders are appointed from the centre and in others they are elected. In Russia, the president is elected through direct secret ballot, and in the United States, the president is elected through a system of electoral colleges.

...for two centuries supporters of the Electoral College have built their arguments on a series of faulty premises. The Electoral College is a gross violation of the cherished value of political equality. At the same time, it does not protect the interests of small states or racial minorities, nor does it serve as a bastion of federalism. Instead the Electoral College distorts the presidential campaign so that candidates ignore most small states - and many large ones - and pay little attention to minorities.

There in front of me was the Senator on the floor being held by the busboy. There was nobody else around, and I made my first frame, and I forgot to focus the camera. The second frame was a little more in focus... then just for a second, while everything was open, the busboy looked up, and he had this look in his eye. I made that picture, and then suddenly the whole situation closed in again. And it became bedlam.(On the 1968 shooting of U.S. presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.)

We also need to make sure women can be in charge of their reproductive health. We can't defund places like Planned Parenthood, where women can go for all kinds of healthcare services. While reproductive rights span much further than the pro-life/pro-choice debate, Donald Trump has actually said he wants to "punish" women for having abortions. And Mike Pence is quite possibly the most anti-choice vice presidential candidate in history.

Flint is a city of a hundred thousand that was having a rough go of it even before its water was poisoned by lead. And when the water crisis finally grabbed national headlines this winter, the Democratic presidential candidates noticed. Hillary Clinton sent senior staff to investigate and asked her supporters to donate to a fund for Flint's kids. Bernie Sanders called on Michigan's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, to resign.

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."

It may seem to your conceited to suppose that you can do anything important toward improving the lot of mankind. But this is a fallacy. You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors. Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.

I would never want to pass a law limiting freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean we have to condone statements that undermine basic national unity and respect. Imagine being asked to defend a country where some citizens say the man in the White House isn't their president. Or a major presidential contender accuses the commander in chief of not even being a U.S. citizen. Those kinds of statements erode trust in our democracy, and it's up to both parties to publicly reject them. We have to restore confidence that we are a nation that loves and believes in itself.

I'm arrogant enough to tell you that I'm smart enough to have scored higher on my Scholastic Aptitude Test than any US president whose SAT score has been made public. I even scored higher than ex-presidential candidate Al Gore, whose SAT score was so high, it was deemed as potentially off-putting to voters.

You want to talk about doing damage to our elections and damaging our stature, to have it just thought and stated repeatedly that the strongman of Russia can pick an American presidential candidate and get him or her elected? Do you think if Hillary had won and the Republicans had tried this line that Putin chose her, do you think that would have gotten past a day in the Drive-By Media? They wouldn't have even taken the story. They'd laughed at it, sloughed it off, and you'd-a never heard about it.

Star Wars may be kind of a cartoon, but the original trilogy depicts a political paralysis which breeds an interest in a strong leader who will make a significant break with the past. And Hillary Clinton is a person - whether you like it or not - of extraordinary experience. I don't know if we ever had a presidential candidate with that level of political experience. There's no learning curve for her. And that, in some periods, would be a huge plus. In the end, I think it will be a significant plus for her now.

Given the realities of the U.S. criminal justice system, the prosecution may be unable to salvage this case. But just because that system fails victims on the regular doesn't mean we have to, too. French commentators are already calling for DSK to jump back into the country's presidential race and ride a wave of sympathy into office. Really, the stakes are greater than even that political prize. If we accept the narrative that only perfect women are raped, we risk sacrificing justice not only for this woman, but for victims of sexual assault everywhere. After all, nobody's perfect.

This wasn’t just an attack against the Boston Marathon... It was an attack against the American public and our democratic use of the streets. We have used our public roadways for annual parades, protest marches, presidential inaugurations, marathons, and all manner of other events. The roads belong to us, and their use represents an important part of our free and democratic tradition.

It doesn't need to be deep and it doesn't need to be a 65-point plan, but just to give some concrete examples of how this economy is going to work for the people that feel right now it's not working for them, and then finally to get to central tension of this campaign. This is a presidential campaign where you have Americans now who want to see change. And Hillary Clinton is the status quo. How can she be both status quo and change?

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

You know, you just know, that after the president goes out there and announces he wants to make community college free for all Americans - as though anything government does is 'free' - or is unilaterally and unconstitutionally legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, he comes back to the offices, pulls out the presidential BlackBerry, and gleefully follows along as the Right goes completely ape over these wild policy decisions.

A political life, I've often said, is a continuing education in human nature, including one's own. My involvement on the ground floor of two presidential campaigns and my duties as First Lady took me to every state in our union and to seventy-eight nations. In each place, I met someone or saw something that caused me to open my mind and my heart and deepen my understanding of the universal concerns that most of humanity shares.

When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.

When President Ashraf Ghani gave his 2014 inaugural speech at the presidential palace, he choked up thanking his wife for her support and announced that she would take on a public role. That a male leader in Afghanistan would thank his spouse - let alone go on to promote her work and appear with her publicly - made news around the world.

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.

Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.

It is about something personal and specific, because when the John McCain campaign in 2008 decided to elevate Sarah Palin from total obscurity to make her his vice presidential running mate, they knew they were making a big strategic gamble.They knew they were taking a big risk and it turned out in the end to be a bad choice. It hurt John McCain`s chances.

The very first thing the President [Truman] did was to show me the new Presidential Seal, which he had just redesigned. He explained, 'The seal has to go everywhere the President goes. It must be displayed upon the lectern when he speaks. The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re-designed it so that it now faces the olive branches ... what do you think?' I said, 'Mr. President, with the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle's neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.'

My job as a reporter, my job as a senior White House correspondent for CNN, is to report the news, but also to highlight and put a microscope on episodes of presidential hypocrisy. And you know, if Donald Trump was going to come after us out on the campaign trail, and as president of the United States through his tweets, I think we are well within our rights to defend ourselves, and also provide that kind of critical coverage to the American people.

As presidential authority expands, and the role of Congress diminishes, the American people continue to lose control over their government. Today's assertions of executive power are indeed a nightmare and Peter Shane's extremely readable and well-informed book describes this disturbing transformation in frightening detail. For anybody who cares about our constitutional system of protected liberties, this book is indispensable. I couldn't put it down and grew angrier, and more concerned, with every page.

It was all for the eventual payoff and thank-you by giving Hillary Clinton the Democrat Party presidential nomination. And it went awry in 2008 because somebody they liked better came along. Somebody they really liked better. I mean, somebody they loved better. They threw her overboard like an unwanted sack of potatoes down on the farm for Barack Hussein Obama. And she seethed, felt betrayed. Don't blame her a bit. They betrayed her big time.

My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education. During the endless 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama would not release his college grades. Given that President George W. Bush and Sens. Al Gore and John Kerry all had proved mediocre grades were no impediment to a presidential bid, Mr. Obama likely had other concerns.

The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many ... , myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.

Nothing will motivate conservative evangelical Christians to vote Republican in the 2008 presidential election more than a Democratic nominee named Hillary Rodham Clinton - not even a run by the devil himself ... I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate. She has $300 million so far. But I hope she's the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton. If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't.

In any case, open-seat presidential elections like 2008 just are different in character from incumbent reelects, and I think that's the most important thing about this election - is that once there's an incumbent running for reelection, most of the debate is about, "Has he [Barack Obama] done a good job?" Most of the judgment is, "Do you want to keep him or do you want to replace him?" Now, the opponent has to also be acceptable and has to make his own case.

So Hillary [Clinton], "I do feel in some ways tired." And that's your leading Democrat presidential candidate for 2016. She's been tired for how many weeks now? Hillary has been tired for how many weeks so she can't go on and explain? It's been two and a half months, and she's been two tired to talk about Benghazi.

The Pavlovian view of women voters - plug the words in, and they will respond - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. But there's a difference between a private conversation and a presidential election, between what we want from our leaders.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

It was a very interesting experience. You know, I don't think words could do it justice. Roseanne [Barr] is a comedian, a laugh a minute at every turn, and this time around she was actually going to be the vice presidential candidate of another Green Party candidate. So I guess she's still in the mix in some ways,sort of learning her politics as she goes, like a lot of us Americans who are getting thrown under the bus and for whom it is not a laughing matter. We are going to stand up and take this seriously and refuse to be intimidated out of the future that we deserve.

Unfortunately, the greater consciousness among Whites about Black equality has not carried over to the new victims of racism - Muslims and Immigrants. There is no racial enlightenment for these groups, which are huge. Millions of Muslims and an equal number of immigrants, who whether legal or illegal, face discrimination both legally from the government and extra-legally from White Americans - and sometimes Black and Hispanic Americans. The Democratic Presidential candidates are avoiding these issues in order to cultivate support among White Americans.

There are people who believe that there should be a standard psychiatric examination for every presidential candidate and for every president. But these are difficult issues because they can't ever be entirely psychiatric. They're inevitably political as well. I personally believe that ultimately ridding the country of a dangerous president or one who's unfit is ultimately a political matter, but that psychological professionals can contribute in valuable ways to that decision.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign posted a pretty clever online quiz that makes a similar point with the Republican presidential field. Who said it? Donald Trump or not Donald Trump? For example, quote, "I mean you can prove you are a Christian. You can`t prove it, then you err on the side of caution." That was not Donald Trump. It was this guy, who strongly denounced Trump`s proposed Muslim ban but supports a religious test for refugees.

Do you know what causes low voter turnout in America? It's the result of having the fate of our nation at stake. This began with the bitter presidential election of 1828, which pitted the education, cultivation, and puritan constraint of John Quincy Adams against the yahoo populism of Andrew Jackson, thereby deciding permanently whether America would become a shining city upon a hill or an overlighted strip mall along a highway.

You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate... to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door... he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

Pope Francis said the use of contraception could be justified in regions hit by the Zika virus; a stance that could reignite a debate over the church's prohibition of the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. The pope also criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as 'not Christian' for his immigration stance, and broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions if they want to.

Modern presidential debating only started with Richard Nixon and John F.Kennedy in 1960, although the proximity of that to the Lincoln-Douglas centennial is more than accidental. The reason is, I think, the medium. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were talking, but the talking was in terms of logic, development, and reasoning. Television, as a medium, resists those qualities in speaking - it favors quick cuts, one-liners, and talking points. I think the modern debates are largely the prisoners of the televised medium

There was an analyst who came out the other day who's had a long track record of projecting presidential campaigns based on the economy and other kind of factors. And he said if [Donald] Trump stays about where he is right now, he'll win at about 51 or 52 percent. If Trump actually gets his act together in a disciplined way, he could win by as much as 66 percent.

Here you have the Republican Party, and they had, what, 16, 15 candidates seek the Republican nomination? And Donald Trump won it. And they have been enraged actually since day one when Trump announced, and his statement did not result in a Trump implosion, and then future Trump statements and appearances did not result in a Trump implosion. But the candidates that the Republican Party...They thought they had the best presidential field ever, and they hated and resented Trump for that.

Donald Trump can't even handle the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he has gotten a tough question from a reporter, when he is challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine, if you dare imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get, America is great because America is good.

In 2012, the far-right Golden Dawn won 21 seats in Greece's parliamentary election, the right-wing Jobbik gained ground in my native Hungary, and the National Front's Marine Le Pen received strong backing in France's presidential election. Growing support for similar forces across Europe points to an inescapable conclusion: the continent's prolonged financial crisis is creating a crisis of values that is now threatening the European Union itself.

There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.

Hillary Clinton really transformed herself into a national security expert. She decided to join the Senate Armed Services Committee, and she became a real military wonk. She was famous for going to every subcommittee hearing and methodically questioning every lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon about defense procurement or selective service benefits. So that's where she really began to carve out and hone this reputation as a hawk that I think has followed her through the secretary of state years and then into the presidential campaign.

There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

The bottom feeders of the entertainment industry were never invited to presidential inaugurations. The bottom feeders of the entertainment were never used as fundraisers for presidents of the United States. They were ignored. There was always a line. They were always there, and they were always who they were, and they always did what they did. The bottom feeders have now become the standard. That's what's different.

You know a Senate race is obviously a much smaller deal than a presidential race. What I think makes a very hard job considerably easier when you're going to debate is if you have reminded yourself - or somebody has reminded you during the course of your campaign - that consistency is enormously important. That people don't want to hear you say one thing in one part of the state and another thing in another part of the state.

I remember we [with Donald Trump] were sitting in a meeting and he walked in and he looked at me and he said - maybe five or six of us in there - and he said, "Are you the first woman to ever run a presidential campaign?" And so the guys in the room said, "First Republican woman." And I said - you know, I always think of Susan Estrich and Mary Kay and Donna Brazile, and respect them enormously; know one of them very well. And I said, "Well, I'm the first Republican one."