Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper!

Remarks during an oval office meeting (November 2005), attributed in Doug Thompson, Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'", Capitol Hill Blue (9 December 2005). Thompson has since retracted this claim, explaining: "When some White House sources came to me with a story that claimed George W. Bush called the Constitution a 'god damned piece of paper, I believed it without question because of my personal prejudices against Bush. I now believe I was wrong and that the incident never happened. The story in our database was modified to reflect my belief that I was lied to about the statement and I was wrong to print it" ("Judge us now to see if we have learned from the past", Capitol Hill Blue (1 January 2011)).