If I were to make public these tapes, containing blunt and candid remarks on many different subjects, the confidentiality of the office of the president would always be suspect.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

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

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.

I have no further use for America. I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ was President.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

You know I vowed when I became President not to talk about the loneliest toughest job in the world and I didn’t.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

My Democratic friends just can’t accept the fact that the American people chose Donald Trump to be president – it’s called democracy. My advice to them, and I say this gently: Fill out a ‚Hurt Feelings Report‘ and let’s move on.

My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.

It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‚How is the president?‘

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.

How can we help President Obama?

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.

When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

I don’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

The American people are bigger than any president. I suppose I have faith in my country and in what it is founded on and the values we hold dear.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‚President Can’t Swim.‘

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.

I’m the only president you’ve got.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

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.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.

Look, when you’re the president, there’s all kinds of things said about us. I mean, it’s just the nature of the job.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

Whoever won’t fight when the President calls him, deserves to be kicked back in his hole and kept there.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.

In 2008, I spoke out against calling the president a Muslim as if that was a curse. And then in 2012, once again, I was very disturbed about some of the intolerance I was seeing in the party, so I made a statement saying there’s a level of intolerance in some parts of the Republican Party. And there was, and I think there still is.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Secrets are things we give to others to keep for us.

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

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

The other day the President said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy?

A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

One of the finest statesmen of the present time is also a first-class scout, and that is Mr. Roosevelt, the late President of the United States of America.

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?‘

That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.