Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

We cannot wish for that we know not.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Leadership to me means duty, honor, country. It means character, and it means listening from time to time.

There are some women I definitely would not want to succeed me… but a man like David Souter, that would be great.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

We must think and act like a nation of a billion people and not like that of a million people. Dream, dream, dream!

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour.

Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

I don’t think I would run for president.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.

I can move any crowd.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.