Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Richard Milhous Nixon

A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don't care what they say, they like it.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
As far as I am concerned now, I have no enemies in the press whatsoever.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the healing.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Don't try to take on a new personality; it doesn't work.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Get a good night's sleep and don't bug anybody without asking me.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority viewpoint-no matter how distasteful to the majority, provided.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I am not a crook.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I believe in the battle-whether it's the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I concede!
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I don't know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I doubt if any of them would even intentionally double-park.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same thing.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I had come so far from the little house in Yorba Linda to this great house in Washington.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I hereby resign this office of president of the United States.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I knew if I continued to look around it would be difficult for me to contain my own emotions. So I turned away from the red eyes of the crowd and looked only at the red eye of the camera, talking to all the nation.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I let the American people down.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I played by the rules of politics as I found them.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others she was a saint.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I took a look around the office. I walked out and closed the door behind me. I knew that I would not be back there again.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I turned into the helicopter the red carpet was rolled up. The White House was behind us now.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I want you to stonewall it.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I would have made a good Pope.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but I'd bet the main house. I wouldn't even bet the outhouse on Mondale.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
I've analyzed the best I can... and I have not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an acceptable course.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
If you have lower than a ten percent turnover, there is a problem. And if you have higher than, say 20%, there is a problem.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
– Richard Milhous Nixon
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
My concern today is not with the length of a person's hair but with his conduct.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
My strong point is not rhetoric, it isn't showmanship, it isn't big promises-those things that create the glamour and the excitement that people call charisma and warmth.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
My telephone calls and meetings and decisions were now parts of a prescribed ritual aimed at making peace with the past; his calls, his meetings and his decisions were already the ones that would shape America's future.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
My view is that one should not break up a winning combination.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain --if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
People in the media say they must look at the president with a microscope. Now, I don't mind a microscope, but boy, when they use a proctoscope, that's going too far.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
People see me and they think, He's risen from the dead.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Solutions are not the answer.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Tell them to send everything that can fly.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The 1976 Bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the Government Printing Office and mailed to you by the United States Postal Service.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The press is the enemy.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
The student who invades an administration building, roughs up a dean, rifles the files and issues nonnegotiable demands may have some of his demands met by a permissive university administration. But the greater his victory the more he will have undermined the security of his own rights.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
There will be no whitewash in the White House.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
They say, Gee, you look great. That means they thought you looked like hell before.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
This is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
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.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.
– Richard Milhous Nixon