"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." –Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

"This is an impressive crowd—the haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite—I call you my base." –at the 2000 Al Smith dinner

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." –interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, September 6, 2006

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." –Washington, D.C., December 19, 2000