Top 1200 President Nixon Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

One of the glories of doing the book So You Want to Be President? was the shifts in tone, where I was able to be humorous and then very serious. And the impeachment page is certainly the best example of that. I didn't have to think too much about how to present this one. I got the idea right away that a good way of showing the shame of President Nixon would be to put him down in the shadows under the Lincoln Monument, with Lincoln sort of glaring down at him from an elevated, better-lit position.

Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency.

Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny - and yes, a good man.

I think I understand the Constitution a little bit because in 1971 we went off the gold standard under President Nixon into the Federal Reserve notes because we were a worldwide currency.

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 was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

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 trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

There's a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn't. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts.

I also read a lot of nonfiction. I just got "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein. I felt like what with everything that is going on with the president [Donald trump] and the parallels with [Richard] Nixon's presidency, I needed to know more about the man.

At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford's constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.

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.

Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.

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.

I became a Republican in the summer of 1972. I was involved in running President Nixon's re-election campaign in California and became part of his administration at the start of his second term.

Few politicians did much to move the needle toward anything resembling gender equality, but it was President Nixon who first threw women under the political bus of Movement Conservatism.

We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.

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?

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.

Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it's harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!

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.

President Nixon has lost his effectiveness as the leader of this country, primarily because he has lost the confidence of the people.

If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.

Nixon wasn't really considered the president by the youth of America. He was considered to be a fraud and which he proved himself to be.

As a child, I remember being in the pool at this pool party and having to get out of the pool to watch Nixon resign. My first idea of a president was of a guy who was a crook.

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.

Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honor I've ever received. Who knows who's listening to me now and what government list I'm on?

Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

When President Nixon said that the American people don't want their foreign policy dictated from the street, unfortunately, he said the most clever political statement I think he's ever said.

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.

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.'

The roots of Nixon's political descent lay at least as far back as May 1970, when the shooting of four young Americans at Kent State University began to turn the president's moderate supporters against him.

In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence.

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.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

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.

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 thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.

I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

President [Ronald] Reagan never has tried to become an expert on military matters. He never has endeavored to learn the most important details in that field, which lead to a situation in which his aides played a much greater roles than aides would have played under President Ford or let us say in the whole Nixon-Ford-Kissinger era.

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.

We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.

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.

I remember feeling proud as I cast my first vote in Chicago in the 1972 presidential election - President Richard Nixon versus Senator George McGovern. Finally, I could participate. There was so much at stake.

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.

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.

Whereas the handling of the case against President Nixon clearly strengthened the nation's respect for law, justice and truth, the Clinton impeachment may unfortunately have the opposite result.

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.

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.

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.