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" Obama's endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson's legislative success on civil rights. "

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" F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security. "

" It's always valuable for someone running for president... to have as much bipartisan support as possible. "

" McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who'd had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts of people and politicians as not to be taken all that seriously. "

" When Gingrich attacked CNN's John King for bringing up his alleged proposal of an open marriage to his second wife, Gingrich accused him of lowering the level of discourse in a presidential debate, suggesting that such a discussion is unworthy of consideration by voters. "

" Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible. "

" President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress. "

" Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. "

" As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence of his eagerness to end America's military role in that country's civil war. "

" Unity is Obama's theme. "

" I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union. "

" The so-called second New Deal of 1935 - including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor - represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity. "

" The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere. "

" As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership. "

" 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. "

" Governing is one thing, campaigning is another - and the latter becomes far more pronounced in an election-year State of the Union. "

" Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver. "

" Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly. "

" From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States. "

" Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker. "

" Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy. "

" Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate. "

" The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth. "

" Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history. "

" At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office. "

" Television has an awful lot to do with the Kennedy mystique and the fact that he's frozen in people's minds at the age of 46, and he was handsome and personable and witty and charming. "

" The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished. "

" There's a certain clubbiness to the idea that you're an ex-president. You're no longer a politician. You're a statesman. "

" Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate. "

" At the start of first terms, presidents invariably have a measure of goodwill. "

" Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable place in the pantheon of American heroes. "