Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Voltaire

Nothing is more important in the preservation of peace than to secure among the great mass of the people living under constitutional government a just conception of the rights which their nation has against others and of the duties their nation owes to others.

Elihu Root

Nothing good comes in life or athletics unless a lot of hard work has preceded the effort. Only temporary success is achieved by taking short cuts.

Roger Staubach

There will be trying times during Obama's presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

Bill Kristol

Learn how to think a few moves ahead at once. In life, if you can anticipate the human mind, you can anticipate all possible futures.

Lionel Suggs

If the world could remain within a frame Like a painting on a wall, Then I think we would see the beauty, then We would stand staring in awe At our still lives posed Like a bowl of oranges, Like a story told By the fault lines and the soil.

Conor Oberst

That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.

George Orwell

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Beauty is often worse than wine intoxicating both the holder and beholder.

John Zimmerman

To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.

Edgar Allan Poe

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow