Top 185 Nixon Quotes

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas’ gambling interests and criminal connections.

Within days of Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire.

Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what’s particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.

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.

I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.

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.

I said in a speech out in Peoria that with Jerry in as vice president, the pressures on Nixon to resign would be unbearable. I know that Republicans see 50 House seats flying out the window in 1974.

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

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.

It was accountability that Nixon feared.

I had never had a particularly warm feeling about Richard Nixon, and it didn’t get any warmer after my service.

When I was younger, I thought of myself as a Nixon Republican because he was the anti-Communist.

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.

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

Patricia Nixon gave up a career to become a political wife. She rose to the pinnacle of glory and then fell to disgrace because of deeds over which she had neither control nor knowledge.

Every president since Nixon has embraced a policy of ‘self-determination without termination’ – the idea that Native Americans are best equipped to govern themselves. Trump is breaking with this position.

Nixon officials foreshadowed both the historic distinction and seamy underside of the presidency.

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.

Even now there is no evidence that anyone involved in the Nixon operation was going to threaten us.

The truth is that for a Democrat to triumph in a presidential election, it needs to come on the heels of ‘the dark times’ of an unpopular Republican administration. Carter followed the Nixon era, Clinton succeeded after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and Obama was a direct result of eight years of Bush/Cheney.

Kennedy was a lot of fun, always. He had something going on. But not Nixon.

While I do not believe Ford was wrong to pardon Nixon, the timing of the pardon was premature and may have cost Ford the margin of victory in the 1976 election.

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

Early in my career when I was with Montreal, we had a lot of good outfielders like Otis Nixon, myself, Marquis Grissom and Larry Walker. We all did the platooning thing, although each one of us could have played every day. We got everybody in the lineup, and everybody got to play.

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.

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.

Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor showing against John F. Kennedy in the televised presidential debate.

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.

The failure of the system to deal quickly was attributable to Nixon’s lying, stonewalling and refusal to come clean. So it took 26 months for the final truth to be known.

Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).

When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.

My mom was a Democrat and I was scared to death that she was gonna blow it. First I was going to hell with Monroe, and now to Republican hell with Nixon.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but a hundred years later, the Republican Party wasn’t Lincoln’s. Richard Nixon became president by courting Americans upset by integration, intentionally fueling the racial divide.

There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.

Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.

The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.

My dad likes to tease me over this. We weren’t there at Fenway, and it wasn’t a consequential game, but Trot Nixon let a ball go through his legs, and from that moment on, I hated Trot Nixon. Really irrational. Based in nothing. But did not like him.

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.

I can remember when President Nixon basically said, ‘All troops have been withdrawn from the delta.’ And I said, ‘Wait, I’m still here.’

I remember, as a kid, nothing struck me funnier than seeing Richard Nixon look into the camera and sincerely tell everyone he didn’t know where the 18 minutes had gone from his tapes. But there was all this sweat on his upper lip. We knew he was lying. He knew we knew he was lying. But he was determined to tell the lie.

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

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.

Forget politics and what their platforms were and everything, because you can take whoever you want to take, but the guy that I liked was Nixon… He was a smart man.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

In 1971, near the middle of Nixon’s first term, he approved a plan to install a White House taping system as a way of preserving an accurate chronicle of important discussions and decisions. Except for Nixon, three aides, and the Secret Service, no one knew about the listening devices.

I thought Nixon was getting ganged up on, but when I heard the tapes, I was shocked and terribly saddened.

Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed. It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal – hardly inspiring – standards of political conduct.

Richard Nixon made a toast to me as a future Prime Minister of Canada when I was 4 months old, sitting as a centerpiece in the middle of a table as my father had plonked me down there. It was more about politeness than any great vision.

I went to see President Nixon at the White House. It wasn’t difficult to get a meeting because I was heavyweight champion of the world. So I came to Washington and walked around the garden with Nixon, his wife and daughter. I said: I want you to give Ali his licence back. I want to beat him up for you.

Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster – Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

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.