Armando Iannucci Quotes

I don’t know if President (George W.) Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making.

At the end of the day, when you are in the front office, your tenure is dictated by the people surrounding you.

You serve the country, and you help the President. If the President wants you to leave, you know, you are two corridors down.

Power always works from the corner office.

It seems with every new day, we have a new veto threat from the president.

Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.

His [the President's] office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.

As a general matter, if the president wants to withdraw from a treaty, he simply gets to do that. And that's part of the powers of the office.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

We don't have a lot of expectations [for Donald J. Trump] because the American administration is not only about the President; it's about different powers within this administration, the different lobbies that they are going to influence any President.

No matter what the job description says, your real job is to make the boss look good.

The Constitution gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon.

The president has the right to select who he wants for the Supreme Court. He doesn't have to get it cleared from Congress, Senate or anybody... No president before this has come under this kind of scrutiny ... before the committee hearings even begin.

If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would.

When the president acts in absence of a congressional grant of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers. When the president takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.

Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.

Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President.

[Walter White] had keep [people] waiting while you got the impression that he was terribly busy with calls to Washington. I've seen such exhibitions in that direction as having someone come out of his office to the switchboard operator - which at that time was sort of located in the center of wherever people were waiting - and ask to call such-and-such a place, or a call through to Mr. So-and-so, or somebody like this, you see.

As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.

I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president.

In the highest government office, you have to be ready to bow out at any time, otherwise you are not a free individual anymore.

(President Nixon,) in the face of a vote to impeach he might try, as "commander-in-chief", to use military forces to keep himself in power.

The Presidents job, is not to wield power himself, but to lead attention away from it.

The Daily Beast reports today that if Steve Bannon is denied a security clearance, the President could simply overrule that denial and order that security clearance.

Why would you want to stay manager and be second-guessed by me when you can come up into the front-office and be one of the second-guessers?