I'm not from a political family and didn't grow up dreaming of being George Washington. I started working in 8th grade and have held every odd job possible - working in a gravel pit, weighing big wheelers, ticket sales, data base management - but I knew if I worked hard and got experience, I could apply that experience to my next endeavor.
Aaron Schock
George Washington didn't have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.
Alexandra Petri
My daughter loves romances. She's a Ph.D student at George Washington University, and when my first book without a clinch cover came out, she said to me: 'Finally, a book I can read on the Metro.'
Ann Maxwell
I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in 'We, the people.'
Barbara Jordan
When George Washington was elected president, there was no national vote.
Ben Nelson
You think of George Washington, this man who was larger than life, and in some ways he was. But at the same time, he's just a person.
Benjamin Walker
We need a Donald Trump more than we've ever needed anybody since George Washington.
Bobby Knight
Smart and savvy, the fearless female member of George Washington's Secret Six is a testament to the strong women who have helped to alter the course of history in this great nation, both in terms of large-scale battles and in the new opportunities they have helped create for future generations through their own fearless examples.
Brian Kilmeade
Annie Lee Smith was my mother's name. My father's name was George Washington Smith. I have to tell you, I got all of my attributes from them, obviously, the tangibles, the intangibles. Particularly my work ethic, my dedication.
Bruce Smith
There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati.
Carroll Quigley
My definition, a definition in the drill books from the time that General Von Steuben wrote the regulations for General George Washington, the definition of the object of military training is success in battle... It wouldn't be any sense to have a military organization on the backs of the American taxpayers with any other definition.
Chesty Puller
Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.
Chris Rock
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
Christine Quinn
It instantly felt like, for me as an actor that I justified, I was able to draw a direct relation between Chris the actor and being George Washington.
Christopher Jackson
I was a freelancer at CNN during the second semester of my senior year at George Washington University.
Dana Bash
There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.
David Henry Hwang
I grew up at 16 years old driving trucks across the George Washington Bridge.
Don Sherwood
It is hard for anyone who discovers George Washington not to write about him, perhaps because he is so hard to discover and such a surprise when you do.
Edmund Morgan
I went to college, George Washington University, and played softball there. I also played professionally but with the real goal of being an Olympian and making the Olympic team.
Elana Meyers
I played softball at George Washington University, and then I played professionally for the Mid-Michigan Ice. I had a couple of tryouts with the U.S. Olympic Team, but I don't know if I have a word to describe how bad one of the tryouts was. It was the worst tryout in the history of tryouts. It was that bad.
Now that the Court has declared money to be speech, I say we replace the current Court with some Ben Franklins, Thomas Jeffersons, George Washingtons, a couple of Susan B. Anthony's, Roosevelts, Hamiltons, a Sacajawea or two, and an Abe Lincoln to cover Scalia in full.
The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.
I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.
Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'
Americans are right to wonder if, at long last, what George Washington called the Great Experiment has failed, and that our founders have lost their extraordinary wager that regular people could govern themselves better than a few rich men could.
'Don Quixote' is a very political book that has been used by diplomats, politicians, guerrilla fighters, to inspire people, to convince them that they themselves can become quixotic. George Washington had a copy of the book on his desk when signing the U.S. Constitution.
Every president since George Washington has taken executive privilege seriously. Every Republican president has.
Doing the show was like painting the George Washington Bridge. As soon as you finished one end, you started right in on the other.
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
Now, today is the day we honor, of course, the Presidents, ranging from George Washington, who couldn't tell a lie, to George Bush, who couldn't tell the truth, to Bill Clinton, who couldn't tell the difference.
George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.
I would give the people of America to their first opportunity to elect a president who doesn't belong to either party since George Washington.
Inaugural speeches are supposed to be huge and stirring. Presidents haul our heroes onstage, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. George W. Bush brought the Liberty Bell. They use history to make greatness and achievements seem like something you can just take down from the shelf.
In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.
When I got a chance, I went back and shared those experiences that were important to me. George Washington High, the campus at San Francisco State, and even back to Emerson Elementary school and Roosevelt Junior High. I was happy to do it, to go back and see if all the same teachers were there.
The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.
You know what's funny is that I have this ongoing relationship with the city of Washington D.C. I went to George Washington University, and my nickname was K-Dub - based on G-Dub - and I'm now on the board of trustees at George Washington University.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.
From George Washington to George W. Bush, presidents have invoked God's name in the performance of their official duties.
The Founders didn't mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Our founders thought long and hard about what the office of president should be. George Washington resisted the role, and then defined it.
On the whole, the accommodationist position has been dominant in U.S. law and public culture ─ ever since George Washington wrote a famous letter to the Quakers explaining that he would not require them to serve in the military because the 'conscientious scruples of all men' deserve the greatest 'delicacy and tenderness.'
George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.
I used to bicycle to work across the George Washington Bridge, but my wife told me it wasn't professional.
Fantasy is the tendency of Americans, going back to colonial times, to look at the Middle East as a type of fractured mirror of the United States - a type of mirror that could look a lot more like the United States, if, say, a Middle Eastern George Washington would emerge.
I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.
My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave.
When I found out that there was eight Presidents before George Washington, I wanted to smack somebody.
George Washington understood that the Bible is the place where God's records of right and wrong are kept.
