Gerald R. Ford Quotes

Presidents don’t get to do do-overs!

To govern is to chose.

This is the biggest mistake I've made so far in my life ... When you're a sportsman, you shouldn't be involved with politics.

But a knife ain't just a thing, is it? It's a choice, it's something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don't. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

Because things like this you can only ssay once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again.

It's easy to be popular when you don't make the decisions a president makes. And it's easy to be unpopular when you're the president because you're making decisions that at the time might seem unpopular; but when historians sort it out, it changes.

My mum will never let me be anything but grounded.

The rules are there for a reason.

You have to make some hard decisions when you're speaker.

If you can't respect me, you have to respect the law.

Simply put, some people think they are above rules or even that rules are there to be broken. Once you start teaching that to your kids, this country is really in trouble.

Everywhere in life people are in authority to make decisions and you have to abide by them, whether right or wrong.

Everybody knows if you have the rules, you need to follow the rules and do exactly what you need to do.

Obviously, flagrant things have to be called. There are rules. You have got to play to the rules, no question.

I know, but no matter what I choose I have to live with it. Forever. I have to be able to go forward and not look back anymore. Can you understand that?

Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it.

I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously.

What's said is said and goes upon its way Like it or not, repent it as you may.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

If you work in either journalism or politics... you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways-but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

And having once chosen, never to seek to return to the crossroads of that decision-for even if one chooses wrongly, the choice cannot be unmade.

It is impossible to erase my choices.

This isn't just 'the way things are.' This is the way you made them. This is the result of your choices, your actions. Yours.