Robert Teeter Quotes

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

Presidents seem to fall into two positive categories: they're one of us, or they're heroes. Both McCain and Obama probably see themselves as potential heroes - presidents who will be looked up to, not presidents everyday people will remark are 'just like me.'

There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing.

I don't think it's the role of the prime minister to court the press.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

A President has to do the image stuff that will help him so that he can do the substantive things he wants to do.

Theodore Roosevelt may have invented the sound byte.

[Ronald Reagan] turned the White House into a soft focus TV studio.

I have no more obligation to spin. When you’re in the White House, you spin.

Every successful president has suffered imputations that he has in sinister fashion charmed the press or used a new medium of communication (radio, television, the Internet) to claim an undeserved standing.

For years, I have been trying to persuade people that George W. Bush, although no Einstein, is not stupid.

In the course of a presidency, a U.S. president says millions of words in public. You never know which of them end up cementing a certain impression.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

In all my life I have treated the press with marked contempt and had remarkable success.

George W. Bush will always do better than you expect.

You can take a position with the media, but don’t necessarily get in their face.

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

If you open yourself up to a wade variety of press questions, the press sets the agenda, not you.

If the press doesn’t get the proper care and feeding, you don’t get the proper spin on your story.

Half of my job is to help build public support for the President’s agenda.

I did not see my job as Press Secretary as to help the press. My job was to help get Tony Brown and the Labour Party elected.

In politics, you don’t have to love the press; you don’t even have to like the press, but you sure as hell have to feed the press.