Quotes About President Nixon

#1. I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

Billy Graham

#2. If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.

Arlen Specter

#3. I became a Republican in the summer of 1972. I was involved in running President Nixon's re-election campaign in California and became part of his administration at the start of his second term.

Ed Rollins

#4. I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations.

Helen Thomas

#5. The vice president (Nixon) seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.

Ann Whitman

#6. Newly released transcripts reveal that President Nixon was drunk during the Arab-Israeli crisis of 1973. After hearing this, President Bush said, 'Hey, so was I!'

Conan O'Brien

#7. I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.

George McGovern

#8. As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!

Ann Coulter

#9. Egyptian President Sadat had a belly dancer entertain President Nixon at a state dinner. Mr. Nixon was really impressed. He hadn't seen contortions like that since Rose Mary Woods.

Johnny Carson

#10. The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

Robert Redford

#11. President Nixon has lost his effectiveness as the leader of this country, primarily because he has lost the confidence of the people.

Edward Brooke

#12. 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

#13. If we had pursued the war on cancer which President Nixon declared in 1970, Jack Kemp might be alive today.

Arlen Specter

#14. If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.

Art Buchwald

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.

Henry A. Kissinger

#19. President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.

Lee Kuan Yew

#20. After the 1970s, when President Nixon's illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.

Eric Schneiderman

#21. I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

Sammy Davis Jr.

#22. In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.

Hugo Rossi

#23. As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

Golda Meir

#24. Unlike President Obama, President Nixon was a capitalist who did not believe in 'remaking' the very character of America.

Monica Crowley

#25. There's a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn't. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

#26. We want accountability. We just buried a president [President Gerald Ford] who did not hold another president [President Nixon] accountable for war crimes and that's why we're in Iraq right now. Our leaders who get us into these messes are the ones who need to be held accountable.

Cindy Sheehan

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. (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

#30. As a child, I remember being in the pool at this pool party and having to get out of the pool to watch Nixon resign. My first idea of a president was of a guy who was a crook.

Kelly Reichardt

#31. 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 M. Nixon

#32. Mr. President, I love you, but you're wrong. (To Richard Nixon, on the Vietnam War)

Paul Harvey

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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 M. Nixon

#36. K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam ... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.

Bob Woodward

#37. 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

#38. When the President does it , that means that it is not illegal.

Richard M. Nixon

#39. They say it's the responsibility of the media to look at government - especially the President - with a microscope. I don't argue with that, but when they use a proctoscope, it's going too far.

Richard M. Nixon

#40. With all the power that a president has, the most important thing to bear in mind is this: You must not give power to a man unless, above everything else, he has character. Character is the most important qualification the president of the United States can have.

Richard M. Nixon

#41. 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

#42. Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

Stewart Udall

#43. That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.

Solomon Burke

#44. 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 M. Nixon

#45. Why would anyone want to be President today? The answer is not one of glory, or fame; today the burdens of the office outweigh its privileges. Its not because the Presidency offers a chance to be somebody, but because it offers a chance to do something.

Richard M. Nixon

#46. 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

#47. 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.

Richard M. Nixon

#48. When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate, he actually pardoned Alexander Haig for the JFK assassination.

Tegan Mathis

#49. I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.

Billy Graham

#50. During the Reagan Administration, Bob Dole was present at a ceremony that included each living ex-president. Looking at a tableau of Ford, Carter and Nixon, Dole said, 'There they are: Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Evil.'

Al Franken

#51. Though others may hate you, those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. ~ President Richard Nixon

Chester Goad

#52. If the President does it, it can't be illegal.

Richard M. Nixon

#53. Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

Hunter S. Thompson

#54. While he was president, it was popular to be a Nixon hater.

Earl Butz

#55. When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#56. I said, "Mr. President, if there are policies of yours with which I disagree, they will be addressed. From time to time you may not like what I say, or how or where I say it. I hope we can work through our differences when those occasions arise." Nixon

Vernon Jordan

#57. Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.

Art Buchwald

#58. Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency.

John Dean

#59. The media will spend weeks going through pay stubs for Bush's National Guard service in Alabama in the waning days of war, but if Kerry tells them exotic tales of covert missions into Cambodia directed by Richard Nixon, they don't even bother to fact-check who was president in December 1968.

Ann Coulter

#60. The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.

Richard M. Nixon

#61. Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.

Gore Vidal

#62. History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.

Bob Dole

#63. 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 M. Nixon

#64. [On Richard M. Nixon:] Americans began with a president who couldn't tell a lie and now they have one who can't tell the truth.

Benazir Bhutto

#65. Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

Robert Dallek

#66. If I had feelings, I probably wouldn't have even survived.

Richard M. Nixon

#67. We all obviously need others to look up to, and be inspirational to us. Ford did a great job as far as putting the presidency back where it belonged, getting the trust back after Nixon. And President Reagan has been one of the most influential presidents.

Steve Garvey

#68. I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.

Stephen Ambrose

#69. In the words of then - vice president Richard Nixon, the increasing crime rate "can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them."37

Michelle Alexander

#70. Believe it or not, I supported Richard Nixon on the issue of presidential privilege. How could anyone conceive of being the president of the United States and think that every single thing that you say or do can become a part of the public record? It just seems so stupid to me.

Jack Nicholson

#71. We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.

Nancy Gibbs

#72. At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford's constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#73. Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon's exit and Mr. Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

Scott Shane

#74. Vanity Fair magazine reports that former President Clinton and Al Gore haven't spoken to each other since George W. Bush's inauguration. Not only that, Bill and his wife, Hillary, haven't spoken since Richard Nixon's inauguration.

Conan O'Brien

#75. One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there's always some reason to live another year. And I'd like to live another year so that Nixon won't be President. If he's re-elected I'll have to live another four years.

Rex Stout

#76. Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?

Johnny Carson

#77. When he (Richard Nixon) took the oath of office, he pledged to be the president for 100% of the people, and I challenge the president to prove that he is being the president for 100% of the people.

Jackie Robinson

#78. The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

Hunter S. Thompson

#79. I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

Richard M. Nixon

#80. Nixon became the first (and to date, only) former Vice President to be elected President (every other Vice President who moved into the Presidency either succeeded upon his predecessor's death, or won election directly from the Vice Presidency).

George Washington

#81. 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

#82. 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 M. Nixon

#83. 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.

Richard M. Nixon

#84. 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 M. Nixon

#85. A president can ask for reconciliation in the racial conflict that divides Americans. But reconciliation comes only from the hearts of people.

Richard M. Nixon

#86. Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

John Podhoretz

#87. When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Noam Chomsky

#88. Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second rate president.

Richard M. Nixon

#89. 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 M. Nixon

#90. I don't remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on.

Stewart Udall

#91. I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-race power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.

Richard M. Nixon

#92. Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

Dan Jenkins

#93. Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

Richard M. Nixon

#94. I hereby resign this office of president of the United States.

Richard M. Nixon

#95. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for
but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

Hunter S. Thompson

#96. The politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of. It's important to take a lesson from the days of Richard Nixon, when people stood up under a very oppressive president with a very oppressive Supreme Court.

Jill Stein