Presidency

"There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state."
        --John Adams

"[The American public demands] a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity, more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way, to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which, in much of the public mind, is the very opposite of politics."
        --James David Barber, "The Presidential Character"

"President, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom--and of whom only--it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President."
        --Ambrose Bierce

"A presidency can shape an era - and it can change our lives. A successful presidency can give meaning to an age."
        --George H. W. Bush

"If a president of the United States ever lied to the American people, he should resign."
        --Bill Clinton, 1974

"When I was a boy I was told that anyone could be President. I'm beginning to believe it."
        --Clarence Darrow

"Truth-telling and persuasion are better instruments of action in American democracy than lying, control and demagogy as long as citizens respond to `the better angels of our nature.' ... [The presidency is the ] seat of power and an engine for policy making, but it is also a moral agent for the articulation of the ideals of American democracy. The character of American governmental institutions and political culture invites presidents to be moral leaders."
        --Ervin C. Hargrove, professor of political science,Vanderbilt University

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

"Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information, which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"When things don't go well they like to blame presidents; and that's something that presidents are paid for."
        --John F. Kennedy

"I mean, obviously, one of the strongest arguments against evolution and selection of the fittest and progress, which is part of evolution, is the current field of the presidential candidates. We started off with Washington and Adams and Jefferson and then we had Lincoln, and now we moved ahead and look where we are now."
        --Bill Kristol, Editor of The Weekly Standard

"Of one thing the executive may be sure: that the majority want more of the good things of life, and if they can get them without undue personal effort, so much the better. So the executive naturally tends to promise material gain, contingent of course on his remaining in power. The impetus to personal rule is obvious."
        --Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism

"People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook."
        --Richard Nixon

"Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second-rate president."
        --Richard Nixon

"The presidency is not merely an administrative office...It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership."
        --Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York Times, 09/11/1932

"When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency."
        --Harry S. Truman