Nobody wants to put the creditworthiness of the United States in jeopardy. Nobody wants to see the United States default. So we’ve got to seize this moment, and we have to seize it soon.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.

It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

Putin goes to bed at night knowing he can break all the rules, and the West will follow all the rules.

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.

I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

That fatal drollery called a representative government.

There is obviously a gap between the public’s perception of the role of U.S. foreign policy and the elite’s perception.

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.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

I am such a political person.

I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

How can a president not be an actor?

When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

As a nuclear power – as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon – the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

It’s not just a matter of whether you support Obama or Romney. It’s who they have coming with them. I always keep my powder dry, as they say in the military.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

Politically, the world is so confused right now – there’s so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

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.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Now, anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it’s going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you’ll never see it.

Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

But do I think that our actions in anyway violate the War Powers Resolution, the answer is no.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

I feel good because I believe I have made progress in rebuilding the people’s trust in their government.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

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

It’s important that we invest in America – literally. The terrorists wanted to destroy our economy, and we can’t let our system fall apart. We also have to invest in one another.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.

Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?

Political courage is not political suicide.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

The only bipartisanship you ever see is when they finally sign a bill and everybody says, ‚Gee, isn’t that wonderful?‘

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

Nobody is above the law. Imagine if there allegations against Modi and he is the Prime Minister. Should the case not be pursued just because he has become the PM. It should not be so that it should be stopped. I am not above the law.

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

So people are talking about revolution. What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.