Top 100 Quotes About Nixon
#1. Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.
Stephen Ambrose
#2. I always thought Nixon was the scary one. The one everyone was afraid of. It's possible I had underestimated Chase... big time.
Rachel Van Dyken
#3. It was a classic Nixon move: goad an opponent into attacking, then ride a wave of sympathy s you defend your honour.
Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy
#4. Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.
Mort Sahl
#6. Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.
John Podhoretz
#7. Richard Nixon was a very complex man. I don't think he was a conservative, nor liberal, not even a moderate. He was a pragmatic politician. He loved politics.
Edward Brooke
#8. My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.
Peter Dinklage
#9. Even now there is no evidence that anyone involved in the Nixon operation was going to threaten us.
Bob Woodward
#11. There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was - as Khrushchev said of Nixon - 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'.
Hunter S. Thompson
#12. More than four decades after Nixon met Mao, the relationship between the U.S. and China has reached a pivotal moment. To date, even as China has become more powerful and present in our lives, Americans have generally found it to be an unsatisfying 'enemy.'
Evan Osnos
#13. If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?
Joseph Heller
#14. Such pip-squeaks as Nixon and McCarthy are trying to get us so frightened of Communism that we'll be afraid to turn out the lights at night.
Helen Gahagan Douglas
#15. Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972 - and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake.
Hunter S. Thompson
#16. Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope.
Eugene McCarthy
#17. It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, "launder" became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
#18. The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.
Pankaj Mishra
#19. The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.
Thomas Mallon
#20. When you look at Kennedy and Nixon, TV played a crucial part in Kennedy's popularity. He was incredibly photogenic, while Nixon was this scowling figure. American viewers judged him on his appearance on TV.
Peyton Reed
#21. Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped.
Bob Woodward
#22. Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.
Christopher Hitchens
#23. Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.
Harry Shearer
#24. Mr. Nixon has, in the last seven days, called me an economic ignoramus, a Pied Piper, and all the rest. I've just confined myself to calling him a Republican. But he says that is getting low.
John F. Kennedy
#25. I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.
Harry Shearer
#26. President Nixon has lost his effectiveness as the leader of this country, primarily because he has lost the confidence of the people.
Edward Brooke
#27. I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.
Thomas Mallon
#28. Presidential campaign observer Teddy White on the second Kennedy-Nixon debate in which the candidates spoke from separate television studios: It was as if, separated by comments from his adversary, Richard Nixon was more at ease and could speak directly to the nation that lay between them.
David Pietrusza
#29. Gary Nixon and I have had a loving, committed, faithful relationship for twenty-five years (now over 30) yet we are denied more than a thousand rights and protections that go automatically with marriage.
Mel White
#30. It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Henry A. Kissinger
#31. If you were surprised when Nixon resigned, just watch what happens when I whup Foreman's behind!
Muhammad Ali
#32. The author commented that John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign team worked like a band of brothers, while Richard Nixon's campaign team worked like a band of brothers in law under the direction of a quarrelsome aunt.
David Pietrusza
#33. I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it. I appreciate anybody who wants to tape me openly and notoriously, and those who feel like they want to sneakily, and wear taping devices, I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.
Rod Blagojevich
#34. Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed,
Molly Ivins
#35. For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.
Hanif Kureishi
#36. On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.
Debi Mazar
#37. The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
Henry A. Kissinger
#38. He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
Lyn Nofziger
#39. I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.
Rod Serling
#40. Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.
Newt Gingrich
#41. I was born in 1970 and I got to see a little bit of [Richard] Nixon's attempts at redefining himself. I saw [Gerald] Ford.
David Mandel
#42. There's a basic law, Klein's second, or third, or fourth law of politics in the TV age, which is warm always beats cold, with the exception of Richard Nixon. The nicer guy usually wins.
Joe Klein
#43. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Hunter S. Thompson
#44. If we had pursued the war on cancer which President Nixon declared in 1970, Jack Kemp might be alive today.
Arlen Specter
#45. Nixon's shifty eyes and perpetual 5 o'clock shadow made him a natural fit for caricatured villainy.
Richard Corliss
#46. If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.
Art Buchwald
#47. Holy Mary, mother of God," my mother said. "You were being chased by Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and a rabbit.
Janet Evanovich
#48. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
John Pilger
#49. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
Hunter S. Thompson
#50. Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.
Rick Perlstein
#51. It became evident to me that there was a very serious political element at work. I know that the term impeachment was bandied about. I do not believe, however, that the word was used with the ferocity it was more recently or that it was in the Nixon years.
Fred F. Fielding
#53. Popular journalists resort to the name Nixon to galvanize feelings that remain at rest even when the name Stalin is mentioned.
Emmett Tyrrell
#54. Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government.
Tom Robbins
#55. I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.
Helen Thomas
#56. I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.
Charles Colson
#57. ROSS PEROT was the best thing that happened in American politics since Richard Nixon acquired a taste for gin. In both cases, the political dialogue of the day was enriched by spontaneous gibberish that entertained the wrong people and made the right ones question their faith.
Hunter S. Thompson
#58. Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]
Gore Vidal
#59. Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.
Ronald Kessler
#60. Nixon regarded himself as having been cheated by life. He never got my vote.
Stephen Ambrose
#61. So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.
Charles Krauthammer
#62. Nixon wasn't really considered the president by the youth of America. He was considered to be a fraud and which he proved himself to be.
George Jung
#63. Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honor I've ever received. Who knows who's listening to me now and what government list I'm on?
Paul Newman
#64. Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon's own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.
Richard Ben-Veniste
#65. Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.
David Halberstam
#66. (President Nixon,) in the face of a vote to impeach he might try, as "commander-in-chief", to use military forces to keep himself in power.
Carl T. Rowan
#67. Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
William O. Douglas
#68. For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures.
Harry Shearer
#69. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.
Nigel Hamilton
#70. Funny that all of Nixon's crimes - anonymous campaign cash, wiretapping, undeclared wars - are all legal now. Discuss.
Bill Maher
#71. That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.
Solomon Burke
#73. If George W. Bush is given a second term, and retains a Republican Congress and a compliant federal judiciary, he and his allies are likely to embark on a campaign of political retribution the likes of which we haven't seen since Richard Nixon.
Paul Begala
#74. I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
Ben Bradlee
#75. Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.
Bob Gunton
#76. She groaned again, and really, I wondered, in that moment, would death be worth it? Was a lifetime of friendship with Nixon that meaningless that I would just toss it away for one more chance with this girl?
Rachel Van Dyken
#77. Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.
David Hoffman
#78. I've said it before: Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. You know, he's been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we've fought for decades.
Jonathan Turley
#79. I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.
Robert Dallek
#80. I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.
John Pomfret
#81. Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don't think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.
Joe Klein
#82. From the 12th Congressional District Hopeful William Jefferson Clinton during the Nixon investigations.
I wanted to share some information I've turned up regarding two of your Clinton quotes.
Keith Richards
#83. When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do.
Hunter S. Thompson
#85. Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg
#86. I might say that when the settlement was made the Nixon administration issued what they called a second inflation alert in which the General Motors settlement was branded as being inflationary and bad for the country.
Leonard Woodcock
#87. Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.
Carroll O'Connor
#88. Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.
Helen Thomas
#89. Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny - and yes, a good man.
Monica Crowley
#90. The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.
Nigel Hamilton
#91. I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction.
Gore Vidal
#92. The American people are suckers," Nixon said. "Gray Middle America - they're suckers.
Tim Weiner
#93. Nixon had sought the treatment of a psychiatrist throughout the 1950s.
Mike Stone
#94. The difference was you worked for Nixon, and with Ford.
Earl Butz
#95. Mr. Ford's decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency.
Scott Shane
#96. Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.
Stewart Udall
#97. Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.
Bob Woodward
#98. When you hear in the tape recordings Nixon's own voice saying, We have to stonewall, We have to lie to the Grand Jury, We have to pay burglars a million dollars, it's all too clear the horror of what went on.
Bob Woodward
#99. Mr. President, I love you, but you're wrong. (To Richard Nixon, on the Vietnam War)
Paul Harvey
#100. More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.
Raul Grijalva
