Congress becomes the public voice of opposition.

There are limits on what a president can achieve or do, but the expectations are so great.

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give to it.

If nobody trusts you as president, then you can't get anything done.

A presidential candidate's great desire is to be seen as pragmatic, and they hope their maneuvering and shifting will be seen in pursuit of some higher purpose. It doesn't mean they are utterly insincere.

With television, you can make anyone look larger than life.

Eisenhower was quite supportive of Kennedy and Johnson in terms of foreign policy.

There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn't.

At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office.

How many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don't resonate that way.

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

Unity is Obama's theme.

I think the public can t accept the idea that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy. They don t want to believe the world is that chaotic. It is.

Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country.

At the start of first terms, presidents invariably have a measure of goodwill.

Obama is cutting back on the idea that we're going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else.

For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope - Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history.

There's a certain clubbiness to the idea that you're an ex-president. You're no longer a politician. You're a statesman.

It's always valuable for someone running for president... to have as much bipartisan support as possible.

A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.

President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress.

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

When Johnson decided to fight for passage of the law John F. Kennedy had put before Congress in June 1963 banning segregation in places of public accommodation, he believed he was taking considerable political risks.

Obama's endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson's legislative success on civil rights.

Kennedy saw the presidency as the vital center of government, and a president's primary goal as galvanizing commitments to constructive change. He aimed to move the country and the world toward a more peaceful future, not just through legislation but through inspiration.

A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson's vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

Historians evaluating George W. Bush's first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.

The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis - often despite the advice they were getting.

Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn't bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.

When Gingrich attacked CNN's John King for bringing up his alleged proposal of an open marriage to his second wife, Gingrich accused him of lowering the level of discourse in a presidential debate, suggesting that such a discussion is unworthy of consideration by voters.

Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.

Presidential aspirants reach for the highest office to satisfy some yearning for greatness or even immortality.

The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.

I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.

The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.

I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.

For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.

For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.

I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.

The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.