George H. W. Bush

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

The day will come – and it is not far off – when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office. When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

I’m not trying to get myself up a notch on the ladder by shoving somebody else down on the ladder, whether it’s a candidate or the president of the United States or anybody else. I just don’t believe that’s the way one oughta campaign, I’ve never done that.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

It’s not that the US is trying to increase the use of drugs, it’s just the natural thing to do. If you were in a position where you had to hire thugs and gangsters to kill peasants and break strikes, and you had to do it with untraceable money, what would come to your mind?

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

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.

No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it’s not about the solvency of Social Security.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

It was a respectful ceremony and I stood in respect throughout it.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

When people grow more alienated and isolated, they begin to develop highly irrational and very self-destructive attitudes. They want something in their lives…[t]hey don’t want to be just glued to the TV set. If most of the constructive ways are cut off, they turn to other ways.

The documents of Japanese fascists are just overflowing with loving kindness…when they were carrying out huge massacres in China they were bringing an “earthly paradise” to China and protecting the people from the ‘bandits’ who were trying to undermine it and so on and so forth.