George H. W. Bush

We are not the sum of our possessions.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

I like a colorful sock. I’m a sock man.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

Nuclear weapons are not a defence.

The Federal Constitution… disavowed beforehand the habitual use of compulsion in enforcing the decisions of the majority.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

In France, to break the powerful labor movement, the US occupying forces needed strikebreakers and, more generally, goons. They reconstituted the Corsican Mafia for that purpose and, in payment, allowed them to restore the old heroin connection based in Marseilles…

It should be known that Israel is based on treachery.

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.

This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy.

[on Bill and Hillary Clinton] Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.

You cannot reform your society or institution without opening your mind.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them.

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the Sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.

I think when you see an aircraft fire, these angry, black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you that you – you – you understand the seriousness of the mission. And you understand your own mortality.

If wall street can borrow money at 0.75% interest, so can college students. We need to stop treating students as profit centers.

I thought being President would be easier than my old life.