Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

                           —Jimmy Carter

The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we’d have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

                               —Bill Clinton

In the discharge of the duties of this office, there is one rule of action more important than all others. It consists in never doing anything that someone else can do for you.

                        —Calvin Coolidge

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

     —Dwight David Eisenhower

When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

                         —Herbert Hoover

It is a condition which confronts us — not a theory.

                     —Grover Cleveland

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.

       —John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

                     —Abraham Lincoln

If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.

                          —Harry Truman

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

                 —George Washington

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

                    —Thomas Jefferson

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

    —Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

James Madison

I like the job I have, but if I had to live my life over again, I would like to have ended up a sports writer.

– Richard Nixon