Nixon Quotes
1. What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.
2. I have impeached myself by resigning.
3. You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.
4. If I were to make public these tapes, containing blunt and candid remarks on many different subjects, the confidentiality of the office of the president would always be suspect.
5. I let the American people down.
6. I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don’t have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.
7. It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.
8. Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.
9. There will be no whitewash in the White House.
10. There will be no whitewash in the White House.
11. If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
12. Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
13. I can see clearly now… that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
14. My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the presidents. I don’t think Kennedy should have done it. I don’t think Johnson should have done it, and I don’t think we should have done it.
15. Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it.
16. Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it.
17. Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.
18. If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything.
19. People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I earned everything I’ve got.
20. It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
21. Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.
22. Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits.
23. You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.
24. Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.
25. If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.
26. The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.
27. Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
28. Solutions are not the answer.
29. Voters quickly forget what a man says.
30. Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.
31. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
32. President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we’re both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.
33. As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.
34. Tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support.
35. In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
36. It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.
37. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.
38. Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.
39. Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.
40. My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.
41. I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
42. Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.
43. There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.
44. The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.
45. My concern today is not with the length of a person’s hair but with his conduct.
46. I’ve never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have any newspapers or magazines to read.
47. The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.
48. I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.
49. We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.
50. A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
51. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
52. I am not a crook.
53. I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.
54. In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
55. I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.
56. Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.
57. The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
58. Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
59. Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.
60. If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
