The issues that cross a president’s desk are never easy. The easy questions don’t even get to the president.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

I have considered voting Conservative because I am so against the Labour party.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I want to be very clear: I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.

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

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

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

The buck stops here!

The problem with EMMA is that it is cost prohibitive for the small investors who were supposed to benefit from the new transparency.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

‚Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

When you get angry, your options narrow.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

We named the book ‚Extreme Ownership‘ because we really found that when we looked at not only at leaders but at teams that were the most successful, we found that the ones that had this attitude of extreme ownership were the ones that did the best, and it’s definitely an attitude that I had.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you’re dealt?

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

You cannot mix sports with politics.

Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.

I don’t really get into a big intellectual analysis of why I am going to do a certain script or not.

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

Obamacare sucks, it can’t be fixed.

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.

When things haven’t gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

I thought ‚Heller‘ was a very bad decision.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right?

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.