Top 100 Quotes About Watergate
#1. The biggest rap on me is that I don't find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It's not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused.
Bob Woodward
#2. My 1974 album 'Mind Over Matter' was a detailed thing about Watergate. I always had some righteous indignation.
Robert Klein
#3. Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
Bob Woodward
#4. The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.
Howard Fineman
#5. I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
Tom Brokaw
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
Conrad Black
#9. This story, I predict, will grow to be worse than Watergate. The American people need to have the answers.
Curt Weldon
#10. I think that in the minds of many, the press is being seen less and less as a neutral observer in the impeachment enterprise and more and more as participants, or even collaborators. On Media's Participation In Watergate
Pat Buchanan
#11. The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
Gerald R. Ford
#12. Watergate is not the sort of issue that changes the vote. I don't know anyone who has changed their vote because of it.
Bob Woodward
#13. The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today.
Elliot Richardson
#14. You know, speaking from experience, I can tell you that there's no aphrodisiac more potent than Watergate-themed cabaret music.
Martin Short
#15. I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.
Sam Ervin
#16. The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam ...
J.G. Ballard
#17. Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
John Le Carre
#18. Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.
Tom Brokaw
#19. After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
Bob Woodward
#20. I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.
Bob Woodward
#21. The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.
Conrad Black
#22. I was dumbfounded by the stupidity of the Watergate break-in.
Gerald R. Ford
#23. I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.
Henry A. Kissinger
#24. I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.
Gore Vidal
#25. If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.
Sam Ervin
#26. Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
Russell Baker
#27. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.
Anonymous
#28. This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.
Dee Dee Myers
#29. Well, a lot of people don't want to be quoted. But keep in mind that Bob Woodward did all of his Watergate reporting with anonymous sources, and we know how that turned out.
Edward Klein
#30. When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.
Anna Quindlen
#31. I remember when I was being told about Watergate, and I thought, "Oh, America is not what I think America is." But America is what I think it is. It's just that it's two bits of it, and I don't go with the Republican bit of it. I go more with the Democratic bit.
Eddie Izzard
#32. The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate.
Dexter Scott King
#33. I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
Joel Salatin
#34. 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
#35. The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.
Robert Dallek
#36. I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.
Bob Woodward
#37. Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
Rick Perlstein
#38. 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
#39. In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.
Jerry Saltz
#40. 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 M. Nixon
#41. I can see clearly now ... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
Richard M. Nixon
#42. When you talk about presidents, loyalty is a great thing until it becomes a bad thing. Witness once again Watergate.
Monica Crowley
#44. Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face..
Ben Bradlee
#45. A censure would put an indelible scar on the president's place in history, .. Monica Lewinsky is not Watergate. Let he who has no sin in this chamber cast the first stone.
Bob Menendez
#46. Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.
Charles Krauthammer
#47. There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.
Ben Bradlee
#48. I was raised - professionally - in the Public Integrity Section. I started in 1976, stayed there for 12 years. It was formed after Watergate by then-head of the Criminal Division Dick Thornburgh, who ultimately became Attorney General.
Eric Holder
#49. I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were.
Dave Barry
#50. I know that from the days of Watergate ... the notion of two sources on a story has become the popular dogma about how you confirm something. And there is a lot of truth to that, but there are all kinds of ways to check to the extent that you can, a story that you get.
Howard Fineman
#51. As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.
James Howard Kunstler
#52. I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.
Michael Sandel
#53. I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.
Elliot Richardson
#54. The French were mystified about the Watergate scandal.
Pierre Salinger
#55. In contrast, for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days.
Jane Mayer
#56. Finally, I will forever be grateful to W. Mark Felt. It was a tug-of-war at times, but he came through, providing the kind of guidance, information and understanding that were essential to the Watergate story.
Bob Woodward
#57. 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
#58. Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.
Billy Graham
#59. From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law.
Leon Jaworski
#60. I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
Aaron Sorkin
#61. The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.
Carl Bernstein
#62. This we learn from Watergate that almost any creep'll be glad to help the Government overthrow the people.
Yip Harburg
#63. ...if that Watergate case ever gets into court, he might get very nervous.
Hunter S. Thompson
#64. No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency - a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.
Richard M. Nixon
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Lawyers didn't seriously get involved in the Watergate stories until quite late, when we realized we were on to something.
Bob Woodward
#68. Sometimes I forget some of the things I've done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn't know what was next.
Diane Sawyer
#69. Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.
Tom Brokaw
#70. Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.
Rush Limbaugh
#71. Maybe this Watergate is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe were going to benefit from it.
Nelson Rockefeller
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior. You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.
Charles Colson
#76. he fought hard against corruption in all forms, especially with the Canal Ring (every scandal during this time seems to have the word "ring" attached to it, much like every scandal since Watergate has "gate" attached to it.)
Michael Rubbinaccio
#77. Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions.
Bob Woodward
#78. I remember being a kid and the Vietnam War was huge and looking at Watergate.
David Cross
#79. There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.
Quentin Tarantino
#80. Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.
Stephen Ambrose
#81. Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity.
Bob Woodward
#82. Suppose Watergate had not been uncovered? I'd still be on the City Desk.
Bob Woodward
#83. 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
#84. O'Neill was perceptive enough to understand the country had a new leader that it wanted to believe in. After the tragedy of Dallas, after the quicksand of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the "malaise" of Jimmy Carter, it needed one.
Chris Matthews
#85. The influences in my life were all kind of politically, socially implanted. And then there was Watergate.
Tobe Hooper
#86. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.
Helen Thomas
#87. It would seem that the Watergate story from beginning to end could be used as a primer on the American political system.
Bob Woodward
#88. The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.
G. Gordon Liddy
#89. for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days. The
Jane Mayer
#90. Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.
Bob Woodward
#91. Do you realize how narrowly a fascist takeover in this country was headed off by Watergate? They all said as much quite frankly in all their boring memoirs. It is extremely important to keep track of these things, and remember.
William S. Burroughs
#93. In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates' finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.
Virginia Postrel
#94. I sat next to Carl Bernstein throughout Watergate, and Woodward would come over, and they would argue everything out, so I was really tuned into what happened.
Ronald Kessler
#95. I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'
Stephen Colbert
#96. For Carter, it was as if the ghosts of Watergate stalked the halls of the White House. As with most ghosts, he wasn't sure they existed, where they were or how to exorcise them.
Bob Woodward
#97. Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
Daniel Keys Moran
#99. 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.
Richard M. Nixon
#100. There may yet be another Watergate book. I have thought a book about the aftermath of Watergate and its impact could be done, perhaps by me or someone else.
Bob Woodward