Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

Just as crises can provide a test of anyone's character, they do so especially with presidents.

Mark my words.It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

The Nixon years were trying. They honed my judgment for everything I did later on. The experience also illustrated for me the importance of training young lawyers properly.

Well, Mr Obama inherited probably the biggest inventory of problems, certainly foreign policy problems, than any American president ever has. I think the entire inventory of problems that he inherited is probably as big overall as any president, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt and maybe, in some cases, worse.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced adversities that, in their times, seemed impregnable. Great presidents overcome great odds.

For years our opponents were hoping to see President Reagan's back against the wall here in the White House. I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind ...

You can never predict what problems a President will face.

During presidential scandals, the White House peddles the illusion that the president and top aides are undistracted, that the nation's business remains foremost in their minds, when in fact the political challenges threaten to overpower all else.

The challenge that we faced with the arrival of the Obama administration is, they didn't really have time to build trust before they had to make big, difficult decisions.

You know, Theresa May, she's doing the best she can with not a great hand, a little bit like Chase Carey really.

Life is not easy in politics.

There was the Missile Crisis, but one can't attribute to the [J.F.] Kennedy years anything like the problems that [Franklin] Roosevelt stood over and surmounted.

This is a complicated time to govern in the world today because of so much going on and it's coming at us at such an unprecedented rate.

In Japan, usually, once you become prime minister, you do not have a second chance. Probably the reason why that was not the case this time is because Japan is facing an increasingly challenging situation.

No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm.

Now that we've made that decision, everyone is thinking about the practical consequences and I think Theresa May could be the most challenging prime ministership since the Suez Crisis, possibly since the Second World War.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed. The fantastically crowded nine months of 1945 taught me that a President either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt I could let up for a single moment.

If I was getting harder, it was in response to the world around me.

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.

Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.

Every president inherits difficult problems. George W. Bush inherited eight years of a failed foreign policy and did nothing about the growing threat of Islamic terrorism, except a one-time lob of a cruise missile into the desert at a camp that had long been abandoned. George Bush inherited that, and 9-11 was the result of that. Every president inherits problems. Harry Truman inherited a war. Stop blaming the person before you and go forward and take leadership and deal with the problem.

Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.

Every new president inherits headaches, but President Obama has inherited an entire emergency room.