Top 1200 Richard Nixon Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Successful presidential campaigns follow a two-part strategy. For Republicans, Richard Nixon described it as running to the right in the primaries and running back to the center in the general election. For Democrats, the idea is to go to the left in the primaries, then to the center.

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).

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.

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.

The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. As a result, Obama is to the right of Richard Nixon on most issues. And there is we believe, certainly some space to exploit there. And we, VICE, aim to exploit it.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.

Covering Richard Nixon's triumphant run in 1968 turned out to be my last major assignment as a general correspondent for CBS News. In September of that year, '60 Minutes' made its debut and I began the best, the most fulfilling job a reporter could imagine.

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier

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.

Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

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.

The court case against me was a dictate out of the White House. Richard Nixon instructed the Justice Department to prosecute pornography to the fullest extent. Now, at the same time, Watergate was going on, so I think he was trying to defer the press or take attention away from his own personal problems.

Abraham Lincoln did not contend that his actions were immune from Congressional correction; on the contrary, he specifically said he was acting beyond the present provisions in the expectation that congress would retroactively approve, which they did. He did not say anything like Richard Nixon: if the president does it is legal.

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

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

Everyday Americans really having the power here. People may remember, or you may have heard if you weren't there during the [Richard] Nixon years, we had one of the worst Presidents ever on record but we the American people have the sense of our own power. We were in the driver's seat.

Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs.

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.

Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

The Democrats' drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court - a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress - not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment. Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

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.

During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.

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

I finally came to Washington. That's when something happened. The Motor Vehicle Act of 1966, even though it was irregularly enforced - sometimes very little under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - it saved over 200,000 lives, millions of injuries prevented or reduced in severity.

Manson's the man who's responsible for "killing the Sixties." He really knew how to play up the whole "most dangerous man alive" thing when at the time, the most dangerous man alive was Richard Nixon.

Women are not unwinnable for Republicans. Ronald Reagan won a majority of them in both of his elections, and by 10 points in 1984. The largest spread in recent history was in 1972, when Richard Nixon, even with that mug, won women by a whopping 24 points.

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.

I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history... The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the 'madman theory': he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.

I had recently had the impression they were changing - not so much by becoming less pro-Pakistan as by becoming less anti-India. I was wrong. My visit to [Richard] Nixon did anything but avert the war.

The irony is that we're really good at comedy in Britain, but for some reason, we make very few comedy films. And when we do, they're either quite American in style, or very Richard Curtis. And I like Richard Curtis, but I think only Richard Curtis should write Richard Curtis films, and other people should try and find their own style.

When he (Richard Nixon) took the oath of office, he pledged to be the president for 100% of the people, and I challenge the president to prove that he is being the president for 100% of the people.

Zeroes are important. A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools.

Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he's on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.

Vanity Fair magazine reports that former President Clinton and Al Gore haven't spoken to each other since George W. Bush's inauguration. Not only that, Bill and his wife, Hillary, haven't spoken since Richard Nixon's inauguration.

It's fairly obvious, since Richard Nixon, that there is no such thing as a fair deal for any voter in the United States -- You're just not gonna get it. It's a joke -- the people that you vote for, they're the next best thing to criminals. But of course they have money for advertising campaigns that make them look a little bit better than they actually are.

I suspected [Richard Nixon] was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan - not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India.

I met Gerald Ford. I met Richard Nixon. I met Jimmy Carter. I met Dwight Eisenhower when he was a general. George Bush senior. I haven't met Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, although I got a letter from 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.

Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it.

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.

To me, the funniest American of the Twentieth Century is Richard Nixon because he had the most to hide, and he was so bad at hiding it. To me, that's what's really funny - people who think they're doing a great job of hiding stuff, and it just keeps leaking out.

[On Richard M. Nixon:] The Republican nominee would be far worse than another Eisenhower - he is Tricky Dicky of the first magnitude. His entire record is one of opportunism. I cannot feel that there is the remotest sincerity in him, and that clearly he would be the tool of the highest bidder, which is always 'big business.

The media will spend weeks going through pay stubs for Bush's National Guard service in Alabama in the waning days of war, but if Kerry tells them exotic tales of covert missions into Cambodia directed by Richard Nixon, they don't even bother to fact-check who was president in December 1968.

I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.

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.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

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.

Richard Nixon even before becoming president, before meeting Henry Kissinger, he said, "This is ridiculous. Communism is nationalist. The Chinese and Russian and Yugoslav and Cuban and - none of these communists get along, and the Koreans and the Vietnamese, and we can do business with them." And then he opened up to China, and that's when the Cold War started.

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.

Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.

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.

Richard Nixon's career certainly ended in failure but someone who won an election with 60 percent of the vote, won 49 out of 50 states, that makes his -up to that point - incredibly successful. The idea of winning 49 states, incredible.

Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.