Sentence Sneak Peek - How to Fight Presidents

How to Fight Presidents by Daniel O'Brien

The first sentence from each chapter of How to Fight Presidents, it's a mini summary of what you can expect to read.

* Book provided for review by Blogging for Books

“I look out at all the fresh young faces in this classroom and I can think of one thing to say: not one of you is ever going to grow up to be the president of the United States.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world: people who don’t actively enjoy being shot at, and George Washing-ton.”

“Let’s get this right out of the way: Our first vice president and second president of the United States of America, John Adams, is much, much smarter than you.”

“The worst crime I could commit as author of this book would be to let the brilliance of Jefferson’s mind and the eloquence of his pen overshadow what a top-to-bottom, balls-out, unflinching badass he was.”

“In his lifetime, James Madison was called the “Father of the Constitution” by his peers, and while the importance of his role in shaping the laws that govern this country could not be overstated, they really should have called him Tiny Impossible Night-mare.”

“It’s unfortunate that James Monroe doesn’t often get the kind of badass street cred that guys like Washington and Jackson get, because he kicked so much ass in the Revolutionary War that his foot has technically spent more time in an ass than it has in a shoe.”

“At the age of eight, John Quincy Adams was made the man of his house while his father, John Adams, was off doing important John Adams things for America.”

“Andrew Jackson, the wild-eyed, hard-fighting, hard-partying, cane-wielding, and ball-stomping son of a bitch who ran our country for eight years was a whole lot of things, and all of them were crazy.”

“Martin Van Buren was a shitty guy.”

“William Henry Harrison was one of those rare men who had only two main jobs in his life: Soldier and President.”

“John Tyler was born to be a rebel.”

“Who the hell is Polk?”

“It was said that Zachary Taylor didn’t fear things he had not personally experienced, which, as a career soldier, proved to be a valuable asset; until such a time as death would prove to be worth fearing, Taylor would court instead of run from it.”

“Millard Fillmore is, hands down, the most under-appreciated and ferociously badass president we have ever had.”

“Widely regarded as one of the handsomest presi-dents, Franklin Pierce was your typical pretty boy, which gives credence to my longstanding theory that pretty boys can’t really be president for shit.”

“James Buchanan has the build of a fighter but the spirit of a bed-wetter.”

“Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, was a mutant.”

“Andrew Johnson, our seventeenth president, just could not catch a break.”

“Ulysses S. Grant was put on this Earth to do two things: kick ass and drink booze, and he will never run out of booze, so you can assume he’ll be sink-pissingly drunk for his bout with you.”

“Rutherford B. Hayes is one of the lesser-known presi-dents, but he’s also the most likely to kick your ass as soon as you count him out.”

“James Garfield’s presidency was cut so short (he was assas-sinated just four months into his first term), that most histo-rians don’t even include Garfield when they’re ranking the best and worst presidents; there’s simply not enough information to figure out his legacy.”

“I can’t predict the future.”

“Every president that’s been discussed so far, and (spoiler alert) every president that is going to be discussed, was a very specific kind of crazy, a craziness cocktail made up of ego, passion, and ambition.”

“Stephen Grover Cleveland, our twenty-second president, wanted the world to know that he was a good and hon-est man.”

“Benjamin Harrison is not to be fucked with.”

“Remember when we said Buchanan was badass for smoking twenty cigars a day?”

“If you’re anything like me, you wrote an entire book about presidents as a flimsy excuse to talk about how much you love Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Maxing out at 340 lbs, William Howard Taft has the distinction of being not only our fattest president, but—wait, nope, that’s it.”

“Thomas Woodrow Wilson is the only person in history to have a PhD and the presidency and a Nobel Peace Prize under his belt.”

“Historians often like to point out how easy it is to ridi-cule twenty-ninth president of the United States War-ren G. Harding for his spectacular failures as a pathetic worm of a president, but they neglect to mention that it’s also incred-ibly fun and very justified.”

“There’s no real way to sugarcoat this: John Calvin Coolidge’s biography reads like the chilling origin story of a serial killer.”

“If you were looking for a good reason to fear thirty-first presi-dent Herbert Hoover, you came to the right place (for this information, and absolutely nothing else).”

“Oh, he’s in a wheelchair, how bad can this fight be?”

“Many of our presidents had tough or at least inspiring early lives.”

“While we know now that most presidents were super crazy, there’s a fairly clear pattern to the kind of craziness.”

“From 1961 until 1963, the United States of America was a high school football team, and John F. Kennedy was the dreamy quarterback that we all respected and lusted after.”

“Pull just about any president out of a hat and you’ll hear the same story: “I had no ambition to be the president of the United States, but God [or ‘the people’] seemed to want me to be president; I humbly accept God’s plan and I am hereby announcing my candidacy for the presidency.”

“Richard His-Mom’s-Maiden-Name Nixon will forever go down as one of the worst presidents of all time, and that is a fact.”

“It’s unfortunate that Gerald “His actual First Name was Leslie and We Should Really Be Making Fun of Him for That More Often” Ford will historically only be remembered for one of two things: his pardoning of Nixon and his inexplicable tendency to fall down with shocking regularity.”

“Viral pneumonia, diverticulosis, a cancerous colon tumor, and a close-range bullet all have one thing in common: none of them had anything to do with Ronald Regan’s death, despite the fact that they were all present in his life.”

“At Roosevelt’s death, a fellow politician said, “Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight.”

“pres-i-dent

Origin: 1325—1375 < Latin prae and sidēns, which translate to “king” and “of the fight-monsters,” respectively.”