Gerald Ford Quotes

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

there was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was 'mean' when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of 'going too far' in their political impressions. You see what I'm getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.1   —President Gerald Ford

I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators.

He’s [Gerald Ford] a nice guy but he played too much football with his helmet off.

Gerald Ford once said that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is.

If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.

I've had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.

The harder you work, the luckier you are, and I worked like hell.

Anybody in public life is well aware of how important the judgments of the press are. I'm firmly convinced that if the good Lord had made the world today, he would have spent six days creating the heavens and earth and all the living creatures upon it. But on the seventh day, he would not have rested. He would have had to justify it to Helen Thomas. (Gerald Ford as quoted by Helen Thomas.)

Don't stop at the Ford's because they're at Gerald Flatt's," a short kid says in passing. "Super dooper!" Granny's dentures clickity-clack. "Don't stomp on the Lord just because it's raining cats." She nods and adjusts her hearing aid. "Those are words to live by, little man!

If compassion and mercy are not compatible with politics," Ford said, "then something is the matter with politics.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our constitution works.

Hooked up with the nazis were the manson family women, sandra good and linda “squeaky” froame. Sandra had been sentenced to fifteen years for threatening the lives of business executives and government officials, and froame was serving a life sentence for attempting to kill president gerald ford. They were like the Bobbsey twins and clear out of their minds.

If I went back to college again, I’d concentrate on two areas: learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.” —GERALD FORD

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.

We used to watch Presidents decay before our very eyes from month to month and even week to week on national TV—except for Nixon, of course, who thrived on power the way that a vampire bat thrives on blood, and Reagan, who seemed a little too stupid to get old. I guess Gerald Ford was that way, too.

If enough American gun-owners urge Congress to do the right thing, and insist the NRA climb aboard, the results might surprise you. Gun owners aren’t dragons, and they don’t have to practice Gerald Ford two-mindedness, simultaneously mourning the victims and denying the role speed-shooters play in these tragedies, forever.

Trying to assassinate the president should not be funny. It really shouldn't. It's not like I was cracking up when we read about Lincoln or JFK. But let's face it, they were real presidents. Gerald Ford ranks right up there with Millard Fillmore and Bush the First on the list of unexciting white men who have run this country, made their way into history books, and otherwise been human sleeping pills. If all the presidents had been television shows, Gerald Ford would probably have been a PBS fund drive. So I'd bet the fact that anyone would try to kill Gerald Ford, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was kind of hard to get excited about, even back in the day.

It was called A Ford, Not a Lincoln, and in it, Richard Reeves described him as “slow, plodding, pedestrian, unimaginative,” “inarticulate,” and “ignorant”—though you didn’t have to take Reeves’s word for it. He also quoted the president’s Grand Rapids pastor: “Gerald Ford is a normal, decent, God-fearing man, but you can say that about a lot of people.

If Abraham Lincoln were alive now, he'd roll over in his grave.

Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.

Never be satisfied with less than your very best effort. If you strive for the top and miss, you'll still 'beat the pack.

If Lincoln were alive today he'd be turning over in his grave.

Things are the way they are now, more than they ever have been before.

If Lincoln were alive today, he'd roll over in his grave.

When Johnson birthed the NEA and the NEH, the budgets were tiny. (The NEH began life in 1966 with an appropriation of $5.9 million, and the NEA $2.9 million.) Under Richard Nixon, both budgets increased exponentially, and two of the NEA’s strongest leaders were Republican appointees: Nancy Hanks, who served under Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Gioia, who served under George W. Bush.

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.” Gerald R. Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States of America. Served 1974–1977. The

The political reaction against Roe v. Wade built slowly. The first justice to join the Court after the January 1973 decision was John Paul Stevens, named by President Gerald Ford in December 1975. Yet remarkably enough, the nominee was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. If the senators’ questions during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing provide a reliable window onto the country’s law-related concerns, then it is reasonable to conclude that abortion had not yet become a national political issue nearly three years after the Court’s decision.

The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9

It's easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost reelection without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose reelection only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn't, it's unlikely they will.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

One of the first subjects for commission members to share in January, one month before witnesses were selected, was the matter of Lee Harvey Oswald’s status as a government agent. Gerald Ford was the only member of the group to write a book on the assassination. It opened with the hushed and secret meeting in which allegations were received that Oswald worked for the FBI. What Ford left out of his book and commissioners ignored in their report was that Oswald had been working for the CIA. Chairman Earl Warren and Commission Attorney Leon Jaworski knew about this. They stated that “Mr. Belli, attorney for Jack L. Ruby, was familiar with these allegations.” Oswald’s informant number was 110669. How was that for a starter?

President Lyndon Johnson was forced to select a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. Texas authorities were called upon to conduct the original investigation. There were too many suspicious people around the world who believed a conspiracy existed. Those rumors had to be squelched. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI never budged from its position that Lee Harvey acted alone. Any evidence that didn’t conform to this conclusion was ignored. Twenty-six volumes of witness testimony and exhibits were published, and only 8,000 copies were sold. No more reprints. The contradiction between the conclusions of the Warren Report, and the abundance of discrepancies in the other volumes, makes fascinating reading. Chief Justice Earl Warren, John J. McCloy and Allen Dulles were LBJ’s logical choices. President Kennedy didn’t trust CIA Director Dulles. Now JFK was dead and Dulles would be in charge of all possible “conspiracy” investigations. Richard Nixon, temporarily retired from politics for the first time since 1946, selected Rep. Gerald Ford to sit on this commission. Nixon selected Ford a second time when he ran home to escape impeachment during the Watergate hearings.

In defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford's solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government's opposition to placing public housing in white areas: "There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way." Thus, the federal government described nondiscriminatory housing policy as punishment visited on the innocent. The Supreme Court rejected Bork's objection, upholding lower court orders that HUD must henceforth construct apartments in predominately white areas of Chicago and its suburbs. The CHA-HUD response was to cease building public housing altogether.

Gerald Ford, one of the most admirable presidents of our time, once observed that if Lincoln were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave. With

His friends and advisors would later agree that he had one overarching reason for challenging President Gerald Ford in 1976: détente with the Soviets. It had been Nixon’s policy, and now it was Ford’s, formalized in the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Reagan believed that the president’s concessions to Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev had been damaging to human rights and extended Soviet power in the region. He saw détente as a one-way street that had enabled the Soviets to grow stronger at our expense.

Gerald Ford, 33rd degree Freemason, member of the Illuminati created Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group; Nixon’s Vice-President; 38th President of the United States (1974-1977);

dramatically INCREASED the amount of absentee and mail-in ballots in the battleground states [while] Prong Two dramatically DECREASED the level of scrutiny of such ballots—effectively taking the election “cops” off the beat. This pincer movement resulted in a FLOOD of illegal ballots into the battleground states which was more than sufficient to tip the scales from a decisive legal win by President Trump to a narrow and illegitimate alleged “victory” by Joe Biden.7 In a landmark Time magazine cover story by Molly Ball, the Democrats have all but confessed to this Grand Stuff the Ballot Box Strategy. And Molly Ball is neither a right-wing hack nor a Fourth Estate slouch; she was the 2019 winner of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. In her “kiss and tell” article, Ball highlighted a long list of operatives who have openly boasted about how they gamed America’s election system to overthrow a sitting president. That she portrayed these smug zealots as saviors of the election rather than as thieves is yet another Big Reveal—not just of Ball’s own Progressive ideology but also of the much deeper rot eating away at our election system and our broader Republic. In this Big Reveal, we bare stark witness to an “ends justify the means” mentality that has gripped far too many Americans on the left. As Corey Lewandowski once put it, these Machiavellian cadres apparently hate Donald Trump more than they love their country.8 Memo number one to Molly’s Merry Band of Democrat Thieves: Destroying the integrity of our election system to topple a sitting president you loathe is no Devil’s bargain. It’s national suicide.

Second, he is credited with almost single-handedly devising the financial rescue package that saved New York City from bankruptcy in 1975, standing tall against President Gerald Ford and his incendiary refusal to help.

These glowing entities were utterly alien to anything humankind had ever encountered. Known in official circles as species X25910, they were nicknamed Phants by the rest of us. Gaseous in the heatless and pressureless void of space, liquid in Earthlike environments, they were seemingly invulnerable. Phants had a peculiar ability to possess human-developed Artificial Intelligences, from those found in combat robots such as Centurions all the way up to the main AIs found aboard supercarriers such as the Gerald R. Ford. Phants could also incinerate human beings on contact, jumpsuits and all, though most of them, colored blue, moved too slowly to be of much threat in that regard. Purple Phants, however, moved very fast. It was a purple Phant that had killed my best friend and platoon brother Alejandro. There were red Phants, too, which were capable of possessing a human in a process known as “integration,” whereby cybernetic components were grafted into the skulls and spines of a host.

I am not sure that historians of the next century who were not there will understand the turmoil the country was in during the Watergate period; I don't think, thirty years from now [1993], that anybody who goes back and reads things will understand the intensity--and the controversy--that exists. If you weren't there, you don't understand it.

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

In 1975, the government admitted its guilt in the murder and offered Olson’s family an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000, which they accepted with an official apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.

There are no soldiers marching in the streets except in the Inaugural Parade; no public demonstrations except for some of the dancers at the Inaugural Ball; the opposition party doesn’t go underground but goes on functioning vigorously in the Congress and in the country; and our vigilant press goes right on probing and publishing our faults and our follies, confirming the wisdom of the framers of the First Amendment.

The key to [the Ford Administration],” explained Bill Seidman, “was to go back to fundamentals. You deregulate the economy so you fight high inflation with competition. You reduce the government’s take so the private sector can provide growth. And by doing that you can reduce interest rates.

Yet Harlow hadn’t forgotten Dwight Eisenhower’s view of Congress as “the worst recruiting ground for presidential candidates.” Legislators were taught to value the art of compromise, said Ike, no doubt a useful political skill, but incompatible with the decisiveness required of any executive.

Fulfilling a White House ambition expressed as early as 1944, Congress authorized a Strategic Petroleum Reserve with up to a billion barrels stockpiled against a national emergency; expanded powers for the executive in the event of another oil embargo; incentives for more environmentally friendly coal production; and tough new efficiency mandates for electrical appliances.

A Gallup poll showed Ford leaving office with a 53 percent approval rating.

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.” Gerald R. Ford,

One of their biggest challenges was the cartoonish public image of Gerald Ford. Arriving in Austria for a state visit, Ford had slipped on the rain-soaked steps of Air Force One and fallen in a heap on the tarmac; ever since, he had been skewered mercilessly on a new television program, Saturday Night Live. Ford had been an All-American football player at Michigan; but in the public mind, he was a pratfalling clown who, reaching for the phone, would staple his ear to his head. The president’s homespun amiability was interpreted as stupidity; he could not “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Lyndon Johnson quipped that he had played too much football without a helmet.

GERALD FORD AND JIMMY CARTER: “I WAS GRIEVED, BUT HONORED TO FULFILL MY PROMISE

Here Are the Perks of Being President: • You don’t ever have to make your own bed. • You don’t ever have to cook your own breakfast (although that was something Gerald Ford liked to do anyway). • You don’t ever have to do your own laundry or take your own clothes to the dry cleaner (but you do have to pay for the dry cleaning yourself; you will be billed for it at the beginning of each month). But Wait! There’s More!! The following free perks also come with the job: • Ballpoint pens • Personalized stationary • High-speed Internet access • Toothbrush cups emblazoned with the presidential seal Nightly turn-down service Breath mints

1976, at the time of the election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter—at that time, during a close contest, only 26 percent of Americans lived in counties where the vote was a landslide.

No man is above justice," George Mason preached at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. That sentiment still rings true, yet competes with the political reality offered by then-representative Gerald Ford, who quipped in 1970 that "an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.

On September 18, 1975, the day Mer arrived, FBI agents swarmed two safe houses, including the one where Patty was hiding. Four days after the arrests, another female radical fired two shots at President Gerald Ford as he exited the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, missing his head by inches. The would-be assassin later said she’d been inspired in part by Patty and the SLA. The astonishing case of the heiress turned kidnapping victim, self-proclaimed revolutionary, terrorist, fugitive, and frail penitent would keep the press enthralled for many moons.

Pres. Gerald Ford is the most remarkably guileless political figure I know. His DNA is hardwired to be a nice guy.

Modern Satanism was pragmatically defined in “The Satanic Bible” by Anton LaVey in the 1960’s and 70’s a Western concept embodying an organized, rational Satanic Philosophy. The Church of Satan was centered on carnal indulgence and fierce independence. Satan has always represented a model of Self-Liberation and crossing boundaries created by dogmatic religion. The Church of Satan provided this platform and over the years the Left-Hand Path tradition has expanded and evolved continuing with Michael Aquino and the Temple of Set. Other controversial and extreme paths centered in Satanic Magick as a road to self-transformation, evolving beyond physical and mental limits and experiencing aspects of Satanic Philosophy and Ceremonial Magick as found in the anarchist and chaos-bringing Sinister Tradition known as the Order of Nine Angles (ONA) in the 1980’s. From the 1960’s and into the late 70’s a self-identified “Sethanic” and “Satanic” Witch named Charles Pace (Hamar’at), living in London, introduced and defined the modern outline of what he called then, “Luciferian” and “Sethanic” initiatory teachings. In the time of Gerald Gardner’s Wiccan movement and the Neo-Pagan RHP explosion, Charles Pace was soon forlorn and a maverick whose authentic Egyptian teachings and rites created a slight aura of fear and the forbidden around him.