Daniel D. Holt Quotes

I don't think the first hundred days measures the success or failure of any President.

I’ve never felt that his private life was the way to judge him. We should judge a president by the way he performs as president.

Sometimes a President seems greater after he has left office than while he was in it.

Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost.

It's actually quite common for presidents to believe that future generations will render a verdict on their presidencies that is more lasting or definitive than the judgments of their contemporaries. The reason is that although history is certainly "an argument without end" - we're still debating many age-old questions - time does help settle others.

Well, I'm not sure, but of one thing I am certain: History judges one differently than contemporary observers, and so I think that as time passes, I hope that not me personally so much, but our administration will be seen for some of the things that we accomplished.

Every year since 1990, the Gallup poll has asked Americans to assess all the presidents since John F. Kennedy. And every year, Kennedy comes out on top.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

It is my fondest wish that in the fullness of time, the American people will look back on the Franken presidency as something of a mixed bag and not as a complete disaster.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

The Grand Old Party's abiding affection for a 'bigger and better' presidency isn't entirely logical. After all, the Obama presidency commenced with an effort to reenact the Hundred Days. Yet President Obama's first-term economic performance itself was not 'big' but mediocre - tiny, even.

Young man, I have lived in this house many years and have seen the occupants of the White House across the square come and go, and nothing you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long.

[Assessing William Howard Taft:] It is very difficult for me to understand how a man who is so good as Chief Justice could have been so bad as President.

Historians will eventually sort out the good and bad of each administration.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

George W. Bush is the worst President in U. S. history.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.

I think President Obama has been an extraordinarily successful president, and that this period will record that with a bunch of exclamation points. But obviously, not everybody thinks that.

It's always easy to judge from afar

History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

I just want to take a realistic look now, now that we have enough distance.