While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

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

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

The time has come for us to draw the line. The time has come for the responsible leaders of both political parties to take a stand against overgrown Government and for the American taxpayer.

Honor is not the exclusive property of any political party.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

I’ve rarely kept my distance from kind of – I don’t know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, ‚Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.‘

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Every President wants to do right.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

To restore the trust of the people, we must reform the way the government operates.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

I found that the corridors of power in Delhi were littered with lobbies of various kinds.

All impeachments, I guess, are political.

I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

We can’t equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it.

With all the… success that I’ve been lucky enough to get? That doesn’t happen unless the home life is solid.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

I think, under President Obama, who was a really bright guy – I didn’t agree with a lot of his politics – but we got to the point internationally where our friends didn’t trust us. They were confused. And our enemies didn’t quite respect us.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

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?

For success of any mission, it is necessary to have creative leadership. Creative leadership is vital for government, non-governmental organisations as well as for industries.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

Senator McCain is Israel’s most unconditional ally in Mossad’s machinations, something that even his worst adversaries would have been able to imagine. McCain participated alongside this secret service in the creation of the Islamic State, which has appropriated a considerable part of Iraq as well as a third of Syria, according to its affirmations.

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

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama’s entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

I can’t go out with a Republican.

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.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

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

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

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.

Only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Part of the problem is there are people in Washington, D.C. in positions of power to whom the border is just a nuisance, and I think some of them believe that illegal immigration is a moral good. It is not. It undermines legal immigration.

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

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.

The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.

If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It’s hard to get off of that equilibrium.

Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America. That’s why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.

Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know.