Francois Hollande Quotes

I gave myself an objective, to be the second president from Correze and finally to be the successor to Francois Mitterrand.

You don't run for the presidency out of nostalgia.

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

I do not rule out the possibility of being prime minister of India one day, but there is still time.

I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

No doubt it was better to have become president than not.

I wanted to be president of the United States. I really did. The older I get, the less preposterous the idea seems.

Ambition characterizes and distinguishes national officeholders from other kinds of human beings.

My old friend Judge Johnson used to say, "The Presidency is unlike the Kingdom of Heaven—those who seek shall never find.

Anybody having a chance to become President usually tries to do so.

I don't ever want to be president - let's just get that out of the way.

I had dreams of high political office.

Anybody who thinks that they should lead the country should go ahead and put their hat in the ring. I am not among them. And I want to be unequivocal about that. There are no circumstances. I don't want to be coy about this.

I have no ambitions to become the PM.

You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.

Anybody who is an ambitious politician would never ever aspire to a Vice Presidency. And yet, people find themselves in that position, and so, therein lies the rub.

Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way - and I did.

You have to be either naive or power-hungry to get into politics. I wouldn't consider it myself. I am too well-informed.

I'm told [ Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto is ambitious. I hope he's very ambitious; ambition may help him see reality.

My beloved Hillary, do not disappoint me. You have to be President, OK?

If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.

Everybody's saying I should run for president.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.

I am the exception to the rule that all senators see themselves in the Oval Office.