• "People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that." - George H.W. Bush, at the 1989 Gridiron Club dinner
• "'Make love, not war'? By the looks of you, you don't look like you could do much of either." - Ronald Reagan, to protesters at UCLA
• Press Secretary Jody Powell "has been trying to persuade me to reopen the White House swimming pool - suddenly ... Any of you that survive would, of course, have permanent swimming privileges." - Jimmy Carter, riffing at the 1979 correspondents' dinner about the old White House indoor swimming pool that Richard Nixon covered over to build the press room
• "At a time when funds for the defence budget may be cut, it's comforting to see so many of the big guns from your industry still getting loaded." - Gerald Ford, at a boozy Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner in 1974
• "Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I wouldn't want to wake up next to a lady pipefitter." - Richard Nixon, in Ms. magazine in 1971 when asked about women's lib
• "So dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time." - Lyndon Johnson, on Ford
• "I don't see anything wrong with giving Bobby a little legal experience before he goes out on his own to practice law." - John F. Kennedy, responding to criticism that Robert Kennedy wasn't qualified to be attorney general
• "If you give me a week, I might think of one." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, when asked to name one big decision that Nixon helped make as vice-president
• "He's no better than a regular sissy." - Harry S. Truman, on Adlai Stevenson
• "I'm not surprised. But what for?" - Franklin D. Roosevelt, when told his wife was in a prison
• "Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." - Herbert Hoover
• "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad." - Calvin Coolidge, on Hoover
• "Jerry - you recall Jerry, whose cards I once sent you to Europe - came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it." - Warren G. Harding, referring to his penis, which he named Jerry, in a 1915 love letter to his mistress Carrie Fulton Phillips
• "A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt." - Woodrow Wilson
• "Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu." - William Howard Taft
• "A flub-dub with a streak of the second rate and common in him." - Theodore Roosevelt, on Taft
• "Well, Judge Day, every change so far in the office of secretary of state has been an improvement!" - William McKinley, to his outgoing secretary of state, William R. Day, after he expressed sadness for leaving.
• "No man has ever yet been hanged for breaking the spirit of a law." - Grover Cleveland
• "When I hear a Democrat boasting himself of the age of his party, I feel like reminding him that there are other organised evils in the world older than the Democratic party." - Benjamin Harrison
• "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa? Gone to the White House. Ha ha ha!" - Grover Cleveland, who had two separate administrations but just not enough good quips to fill them both, so we turn to a joke told not by but about Cleveland during the 1884 race, concerning rumours that he had fathered a child out of wedlock
• "If it were not for the reporters, I would tell you the truth." - Chester A. Arthur, dishing at a Republican banquet about how his ticket won Indiana
• "My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?" - James Garfield, on the presidency
• "Mr. Tilden will be arrested and shot." - Rutherford B. Hayes, when told that a congressional uprising wanted to remove him and install Democrat Samuel J. Tilden
• "No, he didn't write it." - Ulysses S. Grant, when told that Charles Sumner, a righteous senator from Massachusetts, didn't believe in the Bible
• "Washington, D.C., is 12 square miles bordered by reality." - Andrew Johnson
• "If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?" - Abraham Lincoln
• "Pints are very inconvenient in this house, as (champagne) is not used in such small quantities." - James Buchanan, to his liquor merchants regarding their small bottles of bubbly
• "There's nothing left ... but to get drunk." - Franklin Pierce, when asked about a president's duties after leaving office
• "I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read." - Millard Fillmore, declining an honorary degree from Oxford (and possibly poking fun at Andrew Jackson's acceptance of one from Harvard)
• "Stop your nonsense and drink your whiskey!" - Zachary Taylor, when a Whig first suggested that Taylor run for president
• "Mr. Buchanan is an able man but ... sometimes acts like an old maid." - James K. Polk, on Buchanan
• "Doctor, I am going. Perhaps it is best." - John Tyler, on his death bed
• "To Englishmen, life is a topic, not an activity." - William Henry Harrison
• "As to the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it." - Martin Van Buren
• "John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation I will secede your head from the rest of your body." - Andrew Jackson
• "A barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar and can hardly spell his own name." - John Quincy Adams, on Jackson
• "You are a scoundrel." - James Monroe, to Alexander Hamilton
• "I always talk better lying down." - James Madison, on his death bed
• "He is as disinterested as the being who made him." - Thomas Jefferson, on John Adams
• "That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler!" - John Adams, on Alexander Hamilton
• "Now you are well served for coming to fight in favour of the American Rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible Contagion - domestic felicity - which like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life: because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America - I don't know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time." - George Washington, in a 1788 letter congratulating the Marquis de Chastellux on his recent marriage