James MacGregor Burns Quotes

I was asked to write a press briefing emphasizing the positive steps the administration had taken in the area and minimizing the negative ones. I was an Assistant to the President. I have done that for several Presidents. When you’re on the staff of the President of the United States you try and make things look as good as possible.

Misunderstanding is the great enemy of every White House press secretary.

There's no job that will humble you like the White House press secretary job.

The press briefing today I believe has lost much of its usefulness.

My job is to be a spokesman - the spokesman, I suppose - for the President, for the White House, to do the daily briefings, to manage the press corps in terms of travel, day-to-day needs, access, interviews, all those issues.

Politics is a matter of communications.

Our job [White House press secretaries] is to serve the interest of the President while recognizing the interests of the press.

I would love to interview Sean Spicer.

There is an intimacy and trust that is needed between leaders, between their assistants and advisers. Usually, you have the real substance behind closed doors; and the press conferences, you have niceties, nice photo ops.

I know politics; I know the media.

My job is being 'Mrs. Ronald Reagan.'

There is also something called the Legislature. There is something called the press. There is something called people. These are all different players on the stage.

I really want to be governor when I have a partner in the White House.

The day I became press secretary to the President of the United States, I was in an entirely different world from the one I'd been in the day before.

I think it would be so much fun to be in the White House.

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.

The most important thing that the person at the White House knows when he talks to you is that you are not in there.

That man in the White House

The [London] Times has made many ministries.

My New Year's resolution is to make sure I genuflect appropriately before the Chicago media on everything I do.

Compared to Nixon.

Every administration is theater because this is the nature of public life in America.

You don't make new friends in the White House.

Working in the White House is a relentlessly demanding responsibility.