Top 569 Nixon Quotes & Sayings

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.

My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.

Roger Ailes's effect on politics was much longer-lasting than Richard Nixon's, even though Nixon was elected president twice.

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?

Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon's own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.

[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.

It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.

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.

One wonders if Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's administrations may come to be viewed, in the future, as having been underestimated in some respects. To be sure, each ended in failure. Nonetheless, Johnson's accomplishments in civil rights and immigration legislation, and Nixon's in respect to relations with China, may loom larger with the passage of time.

I believe in intermissions. I lived through this experience with JFK and Nixon. JFK should have had an intermission. It should have come right after the Donald Sutherland scene, because then there's just too much information flooding in. You need a break. Same on Nixon. It was a long film, but I couldn't help it, with that kind of subject.

The Republican Party of Richard Nixon was called to power in 1968 to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam and restore law and order to campuses and cities convulsed by crime, riots and racial violence. Nixon appeared to have succeeded and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide.

I'd almost prefer [Richard] Nixon. I'd say [Bill] Clinton is every bit as corrupt as Nixon, but a lot smoother.

Kennedy didn't beat Nixon. Satire beat Nixon.

I'm the first artist of any kind, good or bad, that was ever prosecuted by the Federal Government. Thirdly, they used the law retroactively. The obscenity statutes had changed in the early '70s, and they tried me under a 1969 statute. It was a railroad job. I was with a judge that was a Nixon appointee. A District Attorney who was a Nixon appointee. The only reason I never went to prison is because the Democrats took the White House.

You look forward. You don't go punitive. It's very small-minded to do that. There's campaign rhetoric, and then there's stuff that you actually do," and you're thinking, Snerdley, "He was never gonna prosecute her, just like they didn't prosecute [Richard] Nixon. If anybody was ever gonna prosecute anybody, it would be the Democrats prosecuting Nixon."

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

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.

I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate, and their comment would be, 'He's really slaughtering Nixon.' Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, 'How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?'

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier.

The Watergate is a hotel in Washington where Nixon operatives broke in to steal campaign information from the Democratic Party. Nixon's people subsequently described that act as a 'third-rate burglary.' In the same manner, Clinton has described the FBI investigation of her email escapades as 'a security review.'

Today we reject the notion of equality between a regime that belongs to the democratic world - even if it is conservative and disagreeable - and a totalitarian dictatorship, whether its colors are black, red, or green. This is why we will never again say that Chamberlain is no better than Hitler, Roosevelt no better than Stalin, and Nixon no better than Mao Zedong, even if we do condemn Roosevelt for Yalta, Chamberlain for Munich, and Nixon for Watergate.

I thought a lot about Nixon's personal history and the changes in America during his lifetime and tried to craft stories, which I thought reflected some of his personal history but also the backdrop of a changing America. Nixon grew up in a strict Quaker family. The idea of the American Dream, of hard work and not much fun, was ingrained in Nixon as a child, but curiously so was a love of music. Nixon himself was a pretty good piano player. So it's the contradictions that interest me, as I think we all have them.

It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.

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

The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along - not the Congress nor the courts.

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.

Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions.

Nixon was the one force in Montgomery for a number of years that made any effort in the direction of challenging the power structure. Ed Nixon's source of direction for that comes out of his relationship with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Care Porters and the Randolph philosophy of mass action. So, Ed Nixon really was the force that conceived of the boycott and drew up the original papers for the boycott.

The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn't remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he's telling the truth.

I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.

When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there's a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he's still taping.

I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.

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.

Frost was no match for Nixon - far from being an intrepid and challenging interviewer, he was a pushover for the great and the famous, always deeply impressed with the fact that here he was, David Frost, putting questions to - Richard Nixon!

The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is sayingit is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

When you look at Kennedy and Nixon, TV played a crucial part in Kennedy's popularity. He was incredibly photogenic, while Nixon was this scowling figure. American viewers judged him on his appearance on TV.

I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.

Nixon clearly broke the law in the cover up of Watergate and hush money payments. That was all criminal activity. With these guys, we're not talking about the kind of common crimes that Nixon committed. I can't tell you whether they are technically breaking the law, but basically, the American government has been hijacked by neoconservatives. They are taking an awful lot of national security operations into the White House.

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 heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting the government off your back, lowering the taxes and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air. I said to my friend, I said, "What party is he?" My friend said, "He's a Republican." I said, "Then I am a Republican."

Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

The fact that a TV star can become president should be old news since [Ronald] Reagan, and old news since the Nixon-Kennedy debates - which the famous story, whether or not you agree, is that if you listened on the radio, Nixon won; if you listened on TV, Kennedy won.

If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law, then liberty will soon be dead in this nation. If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along - not the Congress nor the courts. The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion the law as he sees fit.

I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.

Anyone who listens to the Nixon White House would recognize that Nixon, who was in the Navy, was no stranger to profanity.

Larry Hogan Sr. was the first Republican to break with President Richard Nixon during his impeachment hearings, weakening not only the GOP firewall of support for the embattled president, but also Nixon's own defiance.

Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between.

I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being.

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person.

In Democrats minds they've done it before. They got rid of Richard Nixon and they rendered George W. Bush irrelevant. They think they can do it. The thing that they don't understand is Donald Trump is not Nixon, and he is not George W. Bush. And he is not a traditional politician affected by these kinds of assaults the way most politicians are.

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.

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.

Richard Nixon clearly broke the law in the cover up of Watergate and hush money payments. That was all criminal activity. With these guys, we're not talking about the kind of common crimes that Nixon committed. I can't tell you whether they are technically breaking the law, but basically, the American government has been hijacked by neoconservatives. They are taking an awful lot of national security operations into the White House.

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

I've been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called the Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him - if that's a word - for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best.

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.

Richard Nixon was a very intelligent and able man. And he had the right ideas. But he did not have the adherence to principles that [Ronald] Reagan had. He did some very good things. We owe to Richard Nixon the volunteer army - he got rid of the draft. And that was a major increase in freedom.