Michelle Obama Quotes

When you're President you have to make a lot of tough decisions. You have to keep lining them up and making them.

If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I'd hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I'd turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?

When you're in the real world as President of the United States it doesn't go according to the script.

The most difficult issues—the toughest decisions—are the ones that invariably end up on the President’s desk.

The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.

Effective Presidents are those who can achieve a balance between purpose and prudence.

This is the sort of decision that presidents must make: Hard choices with insufficient information.

Good political leadership for me involves getting the big decisions right - however difficult, however controversial, however potentially divisive and then being able to take people with you.

Decisions are never easy. If they were easy, they wouldn't be called decisions.

Your personality as the prime minister feeds through to what you emphasise, and what you don't, how you'll handle a situation - whether you've got the combination of intelligence or instincts to adapt and to make good decisions.

In terms of the principles of politics, I think I understand well. Thailand needs someone who has leadership, who has the management skills to help the country.

The thing that differs me from a lot of other people running for the President of the United States is that I focus on the problem first. Then I focus on what the solution is.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You're trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren't very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

I've developed a much greater respect for our politicians and every high-tech CEO. It's very easy to read about the things they did that you, of course, would have avoided in hindsight.

Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.

Given the daunting challenges that we face, it's important that president elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.

I was obliged to take tough, painful and bold decisions to ensure a manageable tomorrow.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

There is no school that teaches you how to run a state. You make mistakes, but you learn on the job.

[Writing of Harry Truman:] The 1947 assumption of responsibility in the Eastern Mediterranean, the 1948 grandeur of the Marshall Plan, the response to the blockade of Berlin, the NATO defense of Europe in 1949, and the intervention in Korea in 1950—all those constituted expanded action in truly heroic mold. All of them required rare capacity to decide and act.

He [President Warren G. Harding] is a kind, companionable fellow to go with on a fishing expedition or to play cards with; but he is not the man to have as President or leader.

The distinction between a statesman and a politician is that the former imposes his will and his ideas on his environment while the latter adopts himself to it.

Public men have, however, to pick their steps as best they may, for the straight path would lead too often to the cliff-edge.

He [President John F. Kennedy] was very well informed. I think that's why he wasn't afraid of the press.

If you are going to be a wartime president, you have to have the characteristic of being able to be very, very hard.