Richard Nixon Quotes (1913-1994)

“We must maintain the integrity of the White House, and that integrity must be real, not transparent. There can be no whitewash at the White House.”

“The Pakistanis are a different breed. The Pakistanis are straightforward—and sometimes extremely stupid.”

“It was “wrong,” Nixon said, “to assume that the US should go around telling other countries how to arrange their political affairs.””

“No power on earth is stronger than the United States of America today. And none will be stronger than the United States of America in the future.”

“But above all, what this Congress can be remembered for is opening the way to a new American revolution—a peaceful revolution in which power was turned back to the people—in which government at all levels was refreshed and renewed and made truly responsive. This can be a revolution as profound, as far-reaching, as exciting as that first revolution almost 200 years ago—and it can mean that just 5 years from now America will enter its third century as a young nation new in spirit, with all the vigor and the freshness with which it began its first century.”

“As we look back over this century, let us, in the highest spirit of bipartisanship, recognize that we can be proud of our Nation's record in foreign affairs. America has given more generously of itself toward maintaining freedom, preserving peace, alleviating human suffering around the globe, than any nation has ever done in the history of man. We have fought four wars in this century, but our power has never been used to break the peace, only to keep it; never been used to destroy freedom, only to defend it. We now have within our reach the goal of insuring that the next generation can be the first generation in this century to be spared the scourges of war.”

“America's pride has always been its people, a people of good men and women by the millions, of great men and women in remarkable numbers, and, once in a long while, of giants who stand head and shoulders above their countrymen, setting a high and noble standard for us all. J. Edgar Hoover was one of the giants. His long life brimmed over with magnificent achievement and dedicated service to this country which he loved so well. One of the tragedies of life is that, as a rule, a man's true greatness is recognized only in death. J. Edgar Hoover was one of the rare exceptions to that rule. He became a living legend while still a young man, and he lived up to his legend as the decades passed. His death only heightens the respect and admiration felt for him across this land and in every land where men cherish freedom.”

“Tonight we'll dispense with the formalities. I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada: to Justin Pierre Trudeau.”

“As you can imagine, [Pat] is an expert on politics and she predicts whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”

“Despite his Berkeley education, he was firmly anti-American. So Nixon loathed him: “the son-of-a-bitch is a total demagogue.””

“Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts. I mean he just isn’t well screwed on is he? Isn’t that the problem?”

“[Sihanouk is] an intelligent man but vain and flighty... He appeared to me totally unrealistic about the problems his country faced.”

“In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility. That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it. And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.”

“On Christmas Eve, during my terrible personal ordeal of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, which after 12 years of war finally helped to bring America peace with honor, I sat down just before midnight. I wrote out some of my goals for my second term as President. Let me read them to you:”

“As far as I'm concerned, ending this dirty, immoral war is the most urgent thing this Congress has to do. President Nixon, with his phony "Vietnamization" schemes, is nothing but a wind-up, wind-down mechanical man who thinks he's fooling the American people. He and his pals in the Pentagon are full of lies and deceptions; they manipulate words as if they were playing parlor games instead of dealing in human suffering. They're making us live through a B-movie rerun of the Johnson script, which promised "no wider war" but brought just that. Can you imagine telling us to rejoice because only forty American kids a week are getting killed over there now? This is going to be a no-hands war, Nixon says, and so what if it goes on? No ground troops, he says. Just hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs on innocent villagers. Very clean, isn't it? Well, if he thinks he's going to get away with it, he's nuts. Whether he knows it or not, the people are against him. They've had it. And so have I.”

“I don't think Nixon has a friend. I've known him for a long time. I've interviewed him many times, in one of which, at the very end of the interview, I asked him, 'Mr. Nixon, can you ever relax with anyone?' And he said—it was rather pathetic, to me, Dick—he said, 'No, I never can. I can never really let my hair down with anybody.' And then I said, 'Not even with Pat?' And he thought for a moment and he said, 'No, not even with Pat.'"”

“the truth, after all, is that the United States was the richest country and the dominant power after the end of World War II, and that today, a mere quarter of a century later, Mr. Nixon's metaphor of the "pitiful, helpless giant" is an uncomfortably apt description of "the mightiest country on earth."”

“Political pundits have a saying that a great leader needs three things: brains, heart, and guts, or its modern variant, balls. Churchill, for example, had all three. Now start doing your own sums: FDR surely had all three; Nixon had brains and guts, but not much heart. Reagan had a good facsimile of a heart, but not much of a brain...”

“In 1972, Americans watched in disbelief as the Nixon Presidency was virtually brought to collapse, not because of the Watergate "break-in," but by the cover-up and its entanglements. What if the Watergate Scandal had been handled differently? The illegal activities of a few bungling second-story men pale in comparison to the colossal management blunders by the White House inner circle.”

“The presence of a man like Nixon in the White House is an unmitigated disaster, not only for black people in America, but for all the white hopes too, because it confirms, and makes official, and it seals an attitude that is essentially a racist attitude, but it is also, on a most sinister level, an attitude which is simply designed to turn the clock back; to hold back the sea. And you know, that can't be done. What people in power never understand is what people out of power are determined to do, and what people out of power are determined to do is, first of all, to survive you; to withstand you; and if they have to, kill you. And they have the advantage, because they have nothing to lose. The will of the American people, they believe, is like the voice of God. Well, the voice of God spoke out a couple of years ago, and put Nixon in the White House, and put Ronald Reagan in the governor's mansion, and it endures Spiro T. Agnew. And the effect on the American people of the presence of such men in high office is that they are justified in their bigotry, they are confirmed in their ignorance, they are all smaller or greater John Waynes.”

“The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle, it appears to be shaped like a scandal. The government had placed a large amount of oil under this land for safekeeping, but in 1921 it was stolen. The mystery was solved later that same evening when an alert customs inspector noticed former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall attempting to board an oceanliner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum products, which he claimed had been a "gift" from a "friend." At this point, President Harding, showing the kind of class that Richard Nixon can only dream about, died.”

“Although Johnson was done in by Vietnam, his domestic liberalism was as popular in 1968 as the New Deal had been in 1952. Nevertheless, conservatives deluded themselves that Nixon would repeal the Great Society. But just as Eisenhower cemented the New Deal in place, Nixon accepted the legitimacy of the Great Society. His goal was to make it work efficiently and shave off the rough edges. Nixon even expanded the welfare state by expanding its regulatory reach through the Environmental Protection Agency and other new government agencies. Conservatives were infuriated by Nixon’s betrayal, but lacking control of Congress they were stuck with him just as they had been with Eisenhower. Not very many were upset when Watergate pushed Nixon out of office.”

“Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis. This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations. But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacy—and not by accident. Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administration’s record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since. Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities... For all the very real flaws of human rights politics, Nixon and Kissinger’s support of a military dictatorship engaged in mass murder is a reminder of what the world can easily look like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers.”

“From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger, along with President Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — killing perhaps one million during this period. He gave the order for the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger is on tape saying, “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.””