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.

I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.

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

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

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.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

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

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

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I earned everything I’ve got.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

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 can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America. But it doesn’t mean I won’t run.

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.

As president, I’m committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here.

I’m asking myself, ‚What do my girls, what do all our children deserve in their president? What kind of a president do we want for them?‘ Well, to start with, I think we want someone who is a unifying force in this country: someone who sees our differences not as a threat, but as a blessing.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

I don’t like to see a president who is just out campaigning all year long or for the last four years. I’d like to see somebody who’s going in the office. In fact, I’d like to not see them because that way you’d be sure that they’d be working.

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.

I never talk about my next project.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

How can a president not be an actor?

A man who has no office to go, to I don’t care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

One thing you gotta know about me is I have absolutely no filter. I have no problem saying what the hell I think of someone.

Well, 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.

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.

As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary.

I think I’d be a better president because I was in combat.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

We don’t have to guess what Mitt Romney would have done if he were president. Because he told us. He said we should let foreclosures – and I quote – ‚hit the bottom‘ so the market could – I quote – ‚run its course.‘

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

I think it’s funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.

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

I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War.

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.

The President’s post should not be politicised. Once a president is elected, he is above politics.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

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.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

I have decided in 2020 to run for president.

I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman – not me, not Bill, nobody – more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.

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.

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?

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.

There are some members of the House leadership whose only mission in life is to demonize the president.

The ways of the Lord are different from the ways of man. Man’s ways remove people from office or business when they grow old or become disabled. But man’s ways are not and never will be the Lord’s ways.

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.

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

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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.

I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.