Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don’t ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

I do not believe that government should be in the business of telling women what they should do with their bodies.

There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they’re not implemented fully, because the U.S. won’t allow it.

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

If you do a Google search, you will probably read a lot of stuff about how I am someone who wants to kill all the Jews and hates the United States.

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

All impeachments, I guess, are political.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don’t understand why it’s the government’s responsibility.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.

Nowhere is it written that there must be conflict between the United States and China.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

The biggest problem that we have is that California is being run now by special interests. All of the politicians are not anymore making the moves for the people, but for special interests and we have to stop that.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

The Recovery Act is working, but it’s going to continue to work. It’s not over. A lot’s going to happen this summer. And even after the summer, there’s more to come with the act.

Since I’m the president and Democrats have controlled the House and the Senate, it’s understandable that people are saying, you know, ‚What have you done?‘

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

I believe that a government has only one religion – India first. A government has only one holy book – our Constitution. A government has only one kind of devotion – towards nation.

When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, our island was a true Yankee colony. The United States had duped and disarmed our Liberation Army. One couldn’t speak of developed agriculture, but of immense plantations exploited on the base of manual and animal labour that in general used neither fertilizers nor machinery.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.

The United States is a violent military state. It’s been involved in military action all over the place.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Democracy passes into despotism.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

I’m the only president you’ve got.

I take risks because I get bored. And I get bored very easily.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

Let me tell you what I literally told every world leader I’ve met with, and I’ve met them all: It’s never, never, never been a good bet to bet against America. We have the finest fighting force in the world.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.

Good governance with good intentions is the hallmark of our government. Implementation with integrity is our core passion.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

I am often asked if, when I was secretary, I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with, because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

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

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

And what’s interesting, and I don’t think a lot of Americans understand this fact, is that, one, most new jobs are created by small businesses; two, most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax, or many small businesses pay tax there.