Presidential Campaign Quotes

In U.S. elections, the term "October surprise" has come to mean an event in the closing weeks or days of a presidential campaign that could affect or even alter the outcome.

We need to be more precise in how we talk about these issues. People around the word follow our presidential campaigns so closely, trying to get hints about what we will do.

Sometimes in the middle of a presidential campaign, there's a political movie, and people are sick of hearing about politics, and they don't want to see that movie. They'd rather see "Godzilla."

You never fully get over [losing a presidential campaign]. But I've had a good life. I've enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.

Why would there be any contacts with Russian between the presidential campaign? This is all a distraction, and it's all part of a narrative to delegitimize the election and to question the legitimacy of this presidency. The American people see right through it.

Donald Trump can't even handle the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he has gotten a tough question from a reporter, when he is challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine, if you dare imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get, America is great because America is good.

How is it possible that a process can be democratic when it comes by way of money? If there is money then it can be elected a senator, it can be elected a representative. Do you know how much it cost to be elected president of the United States? The amount has reached, billions of dollars, 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion dollars, that's how much a presidential campaign costs. How much does a senatorial campaign cost? It costs 80 to 90 million dollars; or the campaign of a representative, 40 to 50 million. Is that really a democracy?

In presidential campaign I released a 65-page file from the Syracuse University College of Law that showed poor grades, back in college, also. If I were plagiarizing consistently, my grades would have been better.

It doesn't need to be deep and it doesn't need to be a 65-point plan, but just to give some concrete examples of how this economy is going to work for the people that feel right now it's not working for them, and then finally to get to central tension of this campaign. This is a presidential campaign where you have Americans now who want to see change. And Hillary Clinton is the status quo. How can she be both status quo and change?

The fact remains that we're running a presidential campaign. And we're doing that through appearances like today, fund-raisers like today, where Donald Trump was in Texas, raising money, not just for the trump campaign, but, drumroll, please, for the RNC and the Republican committees, which benefits all these candidates that Paul Ryan is trying to protect.

On the issue of Iraq, it is my hope, and my challenge to my colleagues, that our debate will be based on what is best for the future of our nation and for Iraq, not what's best for a political party or presidential campaign.

Presidential campaign getting kind of ugly, did you hear about this? Yesterday, a 27-year-old woman came for to deny rumors that she had an affair with Democratic front-runner John Kerry. The woman added, 'I would never cheat on Bill Clinton.'

A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.

Marco Rubio's presidential campaign has raised $40 million in the last week. When he heard that, Rubio said, 'Hey, any chance I can drop out of the race and just keep the 40 million?'

A political life, I've often said, is a continuing education in human nature, including one's own. My involvement on the ground floor of two presidential campaigns and my duties as First Lady took me to every state in our union and to seventy-eight nations. In each place, I met someone or saw something that caused me to open my mind and my heart and deepen my understanding of the universal concerns that most of humanity shares.

I work really long hours and work a lot and have done press tours and junkets, but there is nothing like a presidential campaign that I have experienced before...I think at one point we visited three different cities in one state in 12 hours. It's exhausting.

Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.

When I hit the skins they all say, 'Damn Kane... You knock out the Bush like a presidential campaign!'

I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

When I joined Bill Clinton's start-up presidential campaign in 1991, I was confident that women would play an ever more important role, but I never gave a minute's thought to what would happen if we won. When we did - and I became the first woman to serve as White House press secretary - it changed my life. But it didn't change the world.

When I first started working in politics, as a junior aide on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign, it never occurred to me that I would one day work in the White House. There were plenty of women among the volunteers who stuffed envelopes and walked precincts. But there were fewer and fewer on each successive level of influence and access.

Let's not overlook, though, what we do know about the campaign finance scandal, and the fact the Chinese were involved in our presidential campaign and our congressional campaigns.

Herman Cain has suspended his presidential campaign, but he has asked the Secret Service if they could continue to provide him protection, at least until his wife cools off.

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like? The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency. Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don't go right. Which is to say, often.

I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.

This week Biden said that he will decide on a potential 2016 presidential campaign by the spring or the summer. Then he said, 'Whichever comes first.'

I heard this today and I thought this was fascinating and interesting. President Bush has two daughters, two beautiful daughters, and they may work on their father's presidential campaign after they get out of college and I thought, well, that's a pretty good move because in this economy, they won't be able to find real jobs.

Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.

Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it's actually most useful to small ones. You can't win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.

Let me just say that anything that I say about what's going on at Justice is pure speculation. Obviously, you know, I'm just going based on my experience as the attorney general, but, yeah, surprised because typically you don't talk about investigations. And it kind of surprised me that that letter went out, and I suppose that the reason for it is because we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. But nonetheless, I think it would be contrary to typical protocol.

I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

...for two centuries supporters of the Electoral College have built their arguments on a series of faulty premises. The Electoral College is a gross violation of the cherished value of political equality. At the same time, it does not protect the interests of small states or racial minorities, nor does it serve as a bastion of federalism. Instead the Electoral College distorts the presidential campaign so that candidates ignore most small states - and many large ones - and pay little attention to minorities.

I am sent on assignments just like guys. I have covered presidential campaigns, natural disasters, tragedies, red carpets, medical stories and more.

Hillary Clinton really transformed herself into a national security expert. She decided to join the Senate Armed Services Committee, and she became a real military wonk. She was famous for going to every subcommittee hearing and methodically questioning every lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon about defense procurement or selective service benefits. So that's where she really began to carve out and hone this reputation as a hawk that I think has followed her through the secretary of state years and then into the presidential campaign.

All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.

Who knows if John McCain could have won that presidential campaign [2008] in any circumstances when George W. Bush the outgoing Republican president had a 22 percent approval rating.

The 2016 presidential campaign is heating up. Can you feel the indifference, the apathy?

Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign announced that it raised over $1.5 million in the 24 hours after he announced his bid. Meanwhile, a 12-year-old on Kickstarter just raised $7 million in five minutes after announcing his idea for juice box water guns.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to roll back government regulations.Trump plans to nominate fast food executive Andrew Puzder to head the Labor Department and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA. If confirmed, the two men would signal a sharp break from the policies of the [Barack] Obama administration.

The legions of reporters who cover politics don't want to quit the clash and thunder of electoral combat for the dry duty of analyzing the federal budget. As a consequence, we have created the perpetual presidential campaign.

An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy country.

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.

Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)

The 2012 presidential campaign's turn away from the classic, straight-up, American election - where the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide wins - is another sad reminder of the extreme political polarization distorting today's politics. No one talks about a 50-state strategy for winning the presidency these days.

I had hoped that the current presidential campaign debates might educate the public as to what is really involved in the ongoing controversy over campaign financing.

Sen. Joe Biden, on the day of announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, called Barack Obama the first mainstream African-American who is articulate, bright, and . . . clean. I think we've seen the shortest presidential campaign in history.

During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians.

Technology policy - whether we should have one and what form such a policy should take - was a core issue of the 1992 presidential campaign, and in February 1993 the Clinton administration confirmed that fostering new technologies will be a critical part of its agenda for redirecting the American economy.

The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.

I'm gonna say that I have followed every presidential campaign since the campaign of President [John F.] Kennedy in 1960.