Quotes About Leadership

It was called A Ford, Not a Lincoln, and in it, Richard Reeves described him as "slow, plodding, pedestrian, unimaginative," "inarticulate," and "ignorant"—though you didn't have to take Reeves's word for it. He also quoted the president's Grand Rapids pastor: "Gerald Ford is a normal, decent, God-fearing man, but you can say that about a lot of people.

But if you admit to not having the answer to any of the problems facing the nation, why should anyone vote of your for President?" "I believe I am the best qualified to wing it." But

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.

People did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group.

The ideal politician is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities.

Now even reformers needed political machines.

Nixon was becoming a discombobulated president, politically on the run. His interior secretary, Walter Hickel, posted a letter to the president that leaked to the Washington Star: "Youth in its protest must be heard." Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all young people in their day, Hickel argued; their "protests fell on deaf ears and finally led to war." (The president's response was to bulldoze the White House tennis court, beloved of Hickel.)

They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn't allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn't allowed in for a decade.

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until " 'we' crack down on 'them,' occasionally adopting their tactics.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.

Rockefeller needed Molitor.

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

God might choose his own time, but Reagan had a taste for coming to the rescue.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

America needs jobs, smaller government, less spending and a president with the courage to offer more than yet another speech.

This administration in Washington that's in power now clearly believes that government is not only the answer to every need, but it's the most qualified to make the most central decisions for every American in every area.

Here is what we know after more than a decade of Republican rule: Texas works. Even 'The New York Times' let it slip into its pages that, 'Texas is the future.'

My hope is that that person will come forward that can win the presidency that we can all get behind.

I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses.

You got to have a courageous president to stand up and says, listen, if - if you send a bill to me that spends more money than what we've coming in, I'll veto it. I mean, I'm going to try to work with you the best I can, but I'm going to veto it.