George H. W. Bush

Read my lips: no new taxes.

The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.

I can’t ever remember sitting around and saying, ‘gosh let’s hurry up and get these debates going, that’ll win it for me.’ Nope.

Every loss of life is terrible.

Well, I think everybody is frustrated by the finances of the U.N. and the inability to solve problems of war and peace.

For 18 years I have resisted talking about current events. I am not going to start now.

If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let’s see it.

Stability of tax policy must be absolutely guaranteed for the next six years.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of an individual person and the interests of the collective.

When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the ‘star’ system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another – Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida – some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

A very small proportion of declassified documents have anything to do with security, no matter how broadly you interpret it. They primarily have to do with ensuring that the major enemy, namely, the domestic population, does not find out what power systems are doing.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

If Stain was such a bad guy why do all these people attribute to him quotes he didn’t make or change his actual quotes just enough to make them seem bad? Seem bad rather than visionary.

…there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves.

Nuclear weapons are not a defence.

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.