Potus Quotes

“The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”
― Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States

“Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.

Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.

And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.”
― Charles M. Blow

“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’.

Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read:

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine]

The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”
― Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

“The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.

I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think 'first woman president.' We think—for example—'first ex-co-president' or 'first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent' or 'first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is the President of Russia and the United States of America.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President-because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around with it-and Bush refused to read it. The Oath of Of­fice says something about, ”I promise to do this, that, and the other thing,” and Bush added the words, ”so help me God.” Well, that’s illegal: he’s not President, if anybody cares.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“President Donald Trump is the canary in a coal mine. A babbling asshat from a galaxy far, far away.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“The forces that run in American politics in our age are many and varied; they run in strange ways in our times of general education--they run in the meeting of white and black; in the nagging, daily concern for war and peace; in automation and unemployment. Yet one man must make them all clear enough for American people to vote and express their desire.

He is the President.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960

“Some critics may say Noonday was mad. He was not. Toweringly weird, yes--mad, no. He saw that in five years he would attain the Presidency of the University. Form there he could embark on a career leading straight to the White House, that High Seat of the Lie, open only to holders of the Third Degree of Falsehood.”
― William Kotzwinkle, Elephant Bangs Train

“President Trump versus COVID-19 is the greatest fight of 2020.”
― Steven Magee

“Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can’t, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“My mind set off in fear and trepidation. Where are the babies and girls in Trump's gulag? I'm a speculative fiction writer. I write horror. There are entirely too many scenarios to mention that gravely concern this iniquitous policy.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“I've said it before, Donald John Trump is the mythological trickster demon we know. That sly fox upon that rock. Michael Richard Pence, however, is the DEVIL.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“Trump will fuck with the Democrats and nominate for Supreme Court a covert right-leaning man or woman African American, Hispanic, Muslim, or, quite probably a bona fide centrist, President Obama's pick- Merrick Brian Garland. Oh, who am I kidding? He's not that smart.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“In the jungles of Vietnam, we used to refer to what Mueller is doing as the Invasion of Cambodia. I'll explain it to you someday.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“Do you hear that? The ticking of the time clock. It started the very moment President Trump reluctantly ordered the FBI investigation (limited though it may be) into the 'Honorable' Brett Michael Kavanaugh.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“The Deep State was not the problem. It was the up-in-your-face state.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“I'm not a state or federal employee, so the shutdown only indirectly affects my family and I. I have, however, been out of work before. I know how it feels to pay bills all the while watching what little I managed to save, dwindle. In your hands, Mr. President, America is Troy.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“America, the Land of the __________ and the home of the __________? Truth is, you or I haven't a clue. You know I'm right.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“President TRUMP is definitely an uncommon POTUS. It is because he is always himself. He does not pretend, like others, to be someone else. And People like that, and they're right.”
― Jean Michel Rene Souche, Le polisseur de miroir: Considerations sur l'artiste

“The Presidential Sonnet

This little sonnet I give to thee,
Who is to lead our land of the free.
Rising above all personal glee,
Open your eyes to what others can't see.
The path you seek your heart will pave,
For you to protect our home of the brave.
In case you fall into the corruption grave,
Awaken your dignity and do not rave.
I write this sonnet in ink of humanity,
So that you never forget your priority.
Stand upright and never you accept pity,
For you are to lead our land of liberty.
Let’s sail boldly into the storms of annihilation,
Breathing light into dark by sheer determination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent

“The United States of America is not the responsibility of merely the President, the Vice President and their administration, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us whose veins carry the spirit of liberty and whose nerves carry the torrents of bravery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“Exactly when was America great? I am only asking to understand the timeframe that we are going back to for a heads-up and better perception and prepardness.”
― Niedria D. Kenny