Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was the 36th vice president from 1953 to 1961 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
His five years in the White House saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, the first manned Moon landings, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Nixon’s second term ended early when he became the only president to resign from office, as a result of the Watergate scandal.
List of quotes
| By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you’ve blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time. |
| I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get. |
| I can see clearly now… that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate. |
| I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning. |
| I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle. |
| I am not a crook. |
| Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion. |
| Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects. |
| Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits. |
| Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet. |
| 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. |
| Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it. |
| Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist. |
| 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. |
| Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. |
| A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue. |
| A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits. |
| I don’t know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports. |
| The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech. |
| 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. |
| The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press. |
| The press is the enemy. |
| The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker. |
| 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. |
| Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people. |
| The Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting. |
| Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. |
| Tell them to send everything that can fly. |
| Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. |
| Solutions are not the answer. |
| Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency. |
| Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. |
| 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. |
| The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire. |
| Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I? |
| I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction. |
| You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character. |
| You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. |
| 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. |
| You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates. |
| When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal. |
| 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. |
| What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance. |
| There will be no whitewash in the White House. |
| We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another. |
| We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. |
| 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. |
| Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs. |
| 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. |
| Tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support. |
| Voters quickly forget what a man says. |
| When I retire I’m going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned. |
| 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. |
| If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. |
| If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories. |
| We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything. |
| 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. |
| I’ve analyzed the best I can… and I have not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an acceptable course. |
| If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world? |
| 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. |
| I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business. |
| I played by the rules of politics as I found them. |
| I let the American people down. |
| 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. |
| I have impeached myself by resigning. |
| People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents. |
| Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. |
| Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out. |
| No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. |
| If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished. |
| 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. |
| In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose. |
| 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. |
| My concern today is not with the length of a person’s hair but with his conduct. |
| 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. |
| Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation. |
| Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth. |
| 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. |
| It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody. |
| 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. |
| 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. |