Presidential Legacy Quotes

The 22nd Amendment limiting a president to two terms is an act of retroactive vindictiveness rather than judicious thinking about the institutions of the republic.

Everything Bill Clinton has done is fair game. He's a former president. I just don't think that is the most effective way to beat Hillary Clinton, because while all that was going on there were a lot of women who felt for whatever reason great sympathy for Hillary Clinton. Look, if my husband were doing that, I would have left him. I would not have behaved the way Hillary Clinton did.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.

One undeniable accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was that it kept Jimmy Carter from being the worst U.S. president in history.

First of all, Bill Clinton was an extremely good president and more importantly, the country was in a very good position when he actually walked away.

The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

Of course a lot of the journalists hated Nixon, but they were always blown away by how smart he was.

Our founders thought long and hard about what the office of president should be. George Washington resisted the role, and then defined it.

The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.

Nixon knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish in his four interviews with David Frost, quite apart from having his agent Irving Paul Lazar negotiate a terrific deal for him, with cash up front.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

I think Ronald Reagan was the best President of my lifetime.

All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama inherited a recession. But unlike them, he has made it worse, not better.

'First Family' on the CW is about the president and his family living in the White House.

President Obama is permanently ambivalent .

I believe that the role of president of the United States is vastly different from the role of candidate and that the Donald Trump of the campaign will not succeed as president.

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

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.

Lincoln is distinguished from every other president, with the exception of Jefferson, in that we can be certain that he wrote every word to which his name is attached.

There is two different Donald Trumps. There is the Donald Trump of the '90s... Now you've got this other one. The post-dementia Donald Trump who just loves picking fights because, I think, he's a lonely man.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.

A few weeks ago, I was at the gym, talking to a friend about politics. Overhearing the conversation, a young man - maybe 25 years old - interrupted to say, 'Obama? He hasn't done a single thing!'