Nixon: Sock it to me?
Coolidge’s most important quote was probably “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
Coolidge said that when he was Governor of Massachusetts in response to a strike by the Boston Police Department in 1919. The quote was widely publicized and brought Coolidge to national attention. As a result, he was nominated as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate a year later and he subsequently became President when Harding died in office.
Good one, although important != famous. As in, people today mostly don’t know about it.
We went to the JFK Library and Museum in Boston this spring - well worth a visit - and something about JFK’s broad accent tickled my 9-year-old son’s funnybone. For weeks afterwards he would say, "I’m going to do [whatever], not because it’s easy, but because it’s hahhhhd."
That’s the quintessential Nixon comment for me (from his post-resignation interviews with David Frost). Pretty much sums up his warped view of power right there.
Some other noteworthy Presidential quotations:
“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” - Andrew Jackson (apocryphal)
“Whenever I hear someone defending slavery, I feel a strong desire to see it imposed on him personally.” - Abraham Lincoln
“Let us have peace.” - U.S. Grant
“Public office is a public trust.” - Grover Cleveland
“It’s a shame to come to office under these tragic circumstances, but it would be worse to be morbid about it.” - Theodore Roosevelt (after the death of President McKinley put him in the White House)
“America must be an arsenal of democracy.” - Woodrow Wilson
“I choose not to run.” - Calvin Coolidge
“I’m paying for this microphone!” - Ronald Reagan
“There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America.” - Bill Clinton
Regards,
Shodan
Sounds like Bush quoting Worf.
Or the Knight Templar from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
In order:
George Bush’s most famous quote is “Read my lips”.
Clinton’s most famous quote is a tie between “I didn’t have sex with that woman” and “Depends on what the definition of the word ‘is’ is”.
GWBush’s most famous quote is “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. It’s not an exact quote of any one particular time, but he said it and said it often and he was wrong.
Obama’s most famous quote thus far is “You didn’t build that.”
W’s infamous line: “we’re going to smoke them out” (in reference to Islamic terroists)
“We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” - FDR, not Woodrow Wilson.
“The world must be made safe for democracy.” - THAT’S Woodrow Wilson!
It may be apocryphal, but one of my favorites quotes is by Eisenhower who wanted to collect as much proof of the Holocaust as possible "because the day will come when some son of a bitch will say this never happened.”
I don’t agree on Obama. “They deserve a vote” is already a bigger deal than the out of context RNC talking point. I’d nominate one of these:
Nixon didn’t say that as president, he said it right after he lost the Gubernatorial race in
California.
I always like “The buck stops here” Harry Truman.
He also referred to himself as “Dick” Nixon. And Eisenhower, IIRC, made the above comment in '45, when the first Nazi concentration camp (Belsen?) was liberated under his command.
Richard M. Nixon’s head, President of Earth: “Arooo” 
And he was right.
“I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” - General Eisenhower, in a letter to George C. Marshall, April, 1945. (The quote appears on one of the walls of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington.)
It is not a tax!!! - Obama
No he wasn’t.
Whew. Glad that’s straightened out.
If you really want it straightened out, here goes:
BrainGlutton thinks that Obama was saying that small business owners didn’t build the infrastructure that small businesses use like roads and bridges. His focus is narrowed like a laser on that alone and thus the thinks Obama is right: Small business owners didn’t build the roads and bridges personally.
However, when you look at Obama’s comments in context it was clear that he was making a broader statement that revealed some deeply flawed assumptions: That small business owners aren’t successful primarily because of their own hard work and intelligence, but rather because of the community they depend on.
It’s generally insulting to small business owners. By saying this Obama was very much wrong and he deserves the flak he gets for it.
But Obama’s defenders have proven not to be capable of understanding that rather than a snippet taken out of context the entire statement was poorly worded and insulting. They can’t see fault in it because they agree with the underlying and flawed assumptions that Obama is coming from. Thus they think it’s all about an out of context sound bite.