We Americans think, in every country in transition, there’s a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves – with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

There’s some jerks. There’s some big egos. There are a few that think they’re one of the Founding Fathers… in both parties.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters, a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don’t believe in it. It’s something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

I’ve always said the one advantage an actor has of converting to a director is that he’s been in front of the camera. He doesn’t have to get in front of the camera again, subliminally or otherwise.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.

Arafat’s departure has created an awesome opportunity.

There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require a courageous change of attitude on the part of political leaders.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.

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.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

The assertion that ‚all men are created equal‘ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him ‚father.‘