The President's decisions make the weather, and if he is great enough, change the climate, too.

What higher obligation does a President have than to explain his intentions to the people and persuade them that the direction he wishes to go is right?

While the Nixon Presidency induced a momentary sense of congressional unity, a more skillful President could readily restore the customary situation where members of Congress felt more solidarity with a President of their own party than with colleagues of the opposite party

Every President reconstructs the Presidency to meet his own psychological needs.

There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.

In Washington, as we learned from the White House transcripts, a president may speak of kicking butts, call a problem a can of worms, decide not to be in the position of basically hunkering down, anticipate something hitting the fan, propose to tough it through, sight minefields down the road, see somebody playing hard ball, claim political savvy, and wonder what stroke some of his associates have with others.

The main problem with being president is the constant sense that you are inside a glass bowl for everyone to see, or in a kind of barometric chamber with an artificial atmosphere where you must stay all the time.

I want the people to love me, but I suppose they never will.

Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

He [John F. Kennedy] might have envisioned himself being alone, at the top but, like Woodrow Wilson, he would find out that not even a President moves free of human entanglement, human needs, human illusions; not even a President can be independent of those around him.

The function and responsibility of the President is to set before the American people the unfinished business, the things we must do if we are going to succeed as a nation.

Whatever the political affiliation of our next President, whatever his views may be on all the issues and problems that rush in upon us, he must above all be the chief executive in every sense of the word.

A Presidents hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

The second office of this government is honorable and easy, the first is but a splendid misery.

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

The president we get is the country we get. With each new president the nation is conformed spiritually.

Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.

Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

I don't know what I expected, but my first morning in the Oval Office had a surprising ring of familiarity to it. It reminded me a lot of my job as governor.

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl.