Quotes About Richard Nixon

#1. I have characterized Nixon as a loner, a cold man with great self-confidence and a one-track mind centered on the advancement of Richard Nixon.

Barry Goldwater

#2. Even when you sign a treaty like I think [Richard] Nixon did, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, George W. Bush reneged on it. He got out of. So any treaty can be withdrawn from.

Jerry Brown

#3. He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.

Tim Weiner

#4. You have an imperial presidency that makes Richard Nixon look like a boy scout.

Allen West

#5. The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.

Bob Woodward

#6. Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.

John Dean

#7. Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

Rick Perlstein

#8. I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon. They called it the imperial presidency when he was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated.

Angus King

#9. Article II of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was just the simple fact that he talked about and suggested the potential use of the IRS against one or two political opponents.

Monica Crowley

#10. 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

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

Johnny Carson

#12. We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

Dave Barry

#13. 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

#14. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today's political scene.

Noam Chomsky

#15. John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

Robert Dallek

#16. Richard Nixon's career certainly ended in failure but someone who won an election with 60 percent of the vote, won 49 out of 50 states, that makes his -up to that point - incredibly successful. The idea of winning 49 states, incredible.

Frank Luntz

#17. Richard Nixon's conversation was loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Rick Perlstein

#18. (Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you.

Christopher Hitchens

#19. The death of JFK to the resignation of Richard Nixon marked a great turning point in American life.

Pierre Salinger

#20. By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

Hunter S. Thompson

#21. During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#22. My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

Rick Perlstein

#23. 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

#24. I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.

Gerald R. Ford

#25. I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.

Hunter S. Thompson

#26. 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

#27. Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.

Ralph Nader

#28. I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

Lyn Nofziger

#29. Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

Hunter S. Thompson

#30. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

Richard Norton Smith

#31. Manson's the man who's responsible for "killing the Sixties." He really knew how to play up the whole "most dangerous man alive" thing when at the time, the most dangerous man alive was Richard Nixon.

John Roecker

#32. What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.

Bruce Vilanch

#33. 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

#34. Richard Nixon will always go down as a failure because of one stupid, moral - and that goes back to that last chapter, on principles.

Frank Luntz

#35. And I also thought that Richard Nixon was the greatest political education we have ever had, but it looks like we need to relearn them again.

Wavy Gravy

#36. George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon,

Hunter S. Thompson

#37. For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

John Podhoretz

#38. I think we're at risk with our democracy. I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame.

Wesley Clark

#39. I met Gerald Ford. I met Richard Nixon. I met Jimmy Carter. I met Dwight Eisenhower when he was a general. George Bush senior. I haven't met Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, although I got a letter from him.

Pete Rose

#40. 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

#41. The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate.

Dexter Scott King

#42. Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.

Harry Shearer

#43. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

Barack Obama

#44. I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

Bayard Rustin

#45. Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Jeff Greenfield

#46. Richard Nixon was just offered $2 million by Schick to do a television commercial - for Gillette.

Gerald R. Ford

#47. The silent majority, that's actually an invention of Richard Nixon's.

Rush Limbaugh

#48. Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Hunter S. Thompson

#49. I think that Richard Nixon is a great man and that he is very dedicated to what he does. I had the pleasure of meeting him when I attended the Republican National Convention in Miami. You can really tell that he is willing to go out of his way to help the American people.

Laraine Day

#50. Only a cheap politician, greedy for political gain, would try to single out one individual for blame. The fault lies not with the individual but with the system, and that system is Richard Nixon.

Pat Paulsen

#51. Ivan couldn't think of a religion that was any damn good at making utter truthtellers out of its practitioners. Maybe the Quakers were truly plainspoken at one time, but even they managed to squeeze out a Richard Nixon after a few hundred years of suppressing their human propinquity for untruth.

Orson Scott Card

#52. I grew up in the era when Dan Rather hated Richard Nixon. He was a newsman, but you knew what his opinion was.

Roger Ailes

#53. If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Jeff Greenfield

#54. 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

#55. My mother said she had me late in life because of Richard Nixon.

L. Joseph Shosty

#56. Lay off the needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.

Abbie Hoffman

#57. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

Thomas Frank

#58. Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

Drew Carey

#59. You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#60. During the 1960 election, I saw Richard Nixon as the winner.

Jeane Dixon

#61. We go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon, the Nurse Ratched of the American political psych ward.

Don Winslow

#62. I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.

William S. Burroughs

#63. John Kennedy won the first televised presidential debate among those watching it, while Richard Nixon won among those listening on the radio.

Susan Estrich

#64. It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

Arthur Bremer

#65. When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide.

Evan Osnos

#66. Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

John F. Kennedy

#67. In my mind, the re-election of Richard Nixon, compared with what was available on the other side, was so much more important that I put it in just that context.

John N. Mitchell

#68. I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.

Charles Colson

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.

Richard Schiff

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

Robert Dallek

#77. 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

#78. Holy Mary, mother of God," my mother said. "You were being chased by Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and a rabbit.

Janet Evanovich

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, "launder" became a dirty word.

William Zinsser

#87. 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

#88. If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?

Joseph Heller

#89. 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

#90. I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.

M. Stanton Evans

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

Paul Harvey

#92. The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

Henry A. Kissinger

#93. Richard Nixon coveted, to the point of obsession, a controversy-free, stage-managed coronation.

David Pietrusza

#94. [democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up,

David Frum

#95. Since the time of Richard Nixon, there has been a strange lack of will in the media to identify the real cause for Americans' anger at politicians who fall, publicly and spectacularly.

Mimi Kennedy

#96. During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.

Ben Shapiro

#97. I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-presidential years, of all of the American presidents in the 20th century.

Roger Morris

#98. Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.

Christopher Buckley

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

Tegan Mathis

#100. I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.'

Bruce Cockburn