Great Throughts Treasury

"Isolation from reality is inseparable from the exercise of power."

"Experience can always be hired. "

"The political life is a life is struggle in which a man is surrounded by enemies who will take advantage of any show of vulnerability."

"Nobody is strong-minded around a President."

"The president really has two jobs. The one that has received the most attention is that of his managerial role, his (probably “her” before very long) responsibility for handling the nation’s affairs. Coupled with that is his role of personifying the nation and becoming thereby the unifying factor that holds us together"

"Another problem lies in the tendency of the unifying aspects of the office to separate a man from the political realities of his times. The president may not have the powers of a monarch, but he is treated like one in his personal life. This was not always the case. There was a time when President Adams could go skinny-dipping in the Potomac, and Andrew Jackson’s inauguration party turned into a brawl which left drunks in muddy boots sleeping on the White House furniture. There was a period when chief executives could emulate Harun ar-Rashid and wander alone at night to learn what people were really thinking. If any one of them tried it today, he would be leading troops of Secret Service agents through the streets of Washington and would be about as incongruous as a whale in the Reflecting Pool below the Lincoln Memorial."

"Data will arrange themselves to fit preconceived conclusions."