Presidential Speech Quotes

People pay attention to what a President says, whether or not he pauses for emphasis in the right places. Sometimes they even read the text.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

The word of the president is a national asset not to be trifled with.

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.

Campaign trains always give me a little feeling of a busy factory, because so many people are busily engaged in turning out ideas to meet different situations as they arrive. If you sit in the President's car and see streams of people go by and hear him ask the inevitable questions:—"How are things in your state; did the drought do much harm; what are you people counting on to help you in your recovery", and then see him picking up everybody's ideas, discarding some, remolding some into his own speeches, you realize that you are really watching an idea factory at work, through which the American people get a picture of the President's thinking, his character, and his plans for the future.

But here's the bottom line, the president of the United States, he controls the bully pulpit, he can talk about anything he wants to talk about.

I'm not going to critique every utterance of the president.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.

When a president speaks that usually means a lot.

During a speech on Sunday, President Obama said to the crowd, 'We've got to vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.' This went on for an hour until someone finally fixed his teleprompter.

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.

[On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly.

Barack Obama was speaking to a Jewish group, and he told them that his name Barack is the same as the Jewish word 'baruch,' which means one who's blessed. That's what he said, yeah. Obama had a harder time explaining his middle name, Hussein. Things got quiet there.

[Bill] Clinton's voice, his manner of speaking and his terminology, "Back in those days... Yeah, back those days... You know, we didn't have the internet back then." My grandfather said, "Back in those days, we didn't have automobiles".

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

This is my maiden voyage. My first speech since I was the president of the United States and I couldn't think of a better place to give it than Calgary, Canada.

One of the first lessons a president has to learn is that every word he says weighs a ton.

We don't like it when the president doesn't even say 'Islamic terror.' It's very disturbing.

Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the "ask not what you can do..." speech, he would answer 'ask not.'

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address - while every night it takes six guys to write this crap!

In those days it was very nice to have a President who clearly spoke the English language.

The other night, the president gave a speech. He said, "children are our most prescious natural resource". I thought, "let's hope it never comes to that".

I would be concerned if any speech to Congress related any information that's new to the president of the United States.

Jeb Bush gave a speech yesterday. He had a pretty rough time. He accidentally said that ISIS has 200,000 men instead of 20,000, and then he mispronounced the name of the terrorist group Boko Haram. So if history has taught us anything, Jeb is well on his way to winning the White House.