Wit and Wisdom of the American Presidents

"I know only two tunes," said Ulysses S. Grant. "One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't." Jimmy Carter observed: "Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread." And Warren Harding complained: "The White House is a prison. I can't get away from the men who dog my footsteps. I am in jail."

This entertaining, handy little book includes over 400 other memorable quotes, expressed by America's chief executives over the past two centuries, among them Chester Arthur's blunt, "I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business," Calvin Coolidge's terse "The chief business of America is business," Dwight Eisenhower's "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield," and George Herbert Walker Bush's "Read my lips, no new taxes."

From George Washington to Barack Obama, these presidential declarations will not only provide public speakers and students of American history with a wealth of useful material, they'll also delight general readers.