You can be a great president and be ridden with flaws. Of course we know that.
One thing that does seem to me to be fairly consistent is that presidents who restrict civil liberties, even in wartime, are usually judged harshly for it. So most people agree that one of the worst stains on the reputation of FDR, who is widely considered a great president, is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Likewise, Lincoln is judged harshly for the suspension of habeas corpus.
Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man - too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.
Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.
Hillary Clinton is probably one of the best prepared people to walk into the Oval Office certainly in a generation, with all the love and respect and admiration that I have for President Obama, and he's been a great president, going in he was nowhere nearly as prepared as Hillary Clinton.
There are a lot of women that I think are very powerful and would be great presidents.
We need a great president who can lead us through the great challenges we face.
I could have easily not run for president, and people would have come up and said, "Oh, man, you would have been a great president." Or even a lousy president. But I never would have known had I not chosen to run. Part of life is seizing the moment.
The great presidents are people who watch out for others.
No great president in the USA has been primarily a me-first person.
All you need to know about Donald Trump is he loves his family and he loves this country. And he's going to be a great president of the United States.
Liberty in the United States will never be reestablished so long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural feats and therefore tolerate a virtually unlimited exercise of presidential power. Until we can restore limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us from great presidents.
He was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn't the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with. ...Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader.
The presidency is a serious job that requires sound judgment and good ideas, and there's no doubt in my mind that Jeb Bush has the experience and the character to be a great president.
I don't pick my presidents because they were great presidents. I'm not much interested in ranking presidents and who is the best and who is the worst. I am much more inclined to be interested in them if they had an interesting life and if they were a complete person - and by that I mean they also had flaws and failings.
Jeb Bush is my friend. I think he'd make a great president. I've nudged him for some time.
From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.
Great presidents don't just fight good fights - they win them.
I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.
Some of the presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that.
There will be great presidents again but there will never be another Camelot.
One right decision doth not a great president make.
After all the allowances are made for the necessity of having a few supermen in our midst - explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history - the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished.
George W. Bush is not only a great president; he was a great candidate.
The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. Thats the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.
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