Richard M. Nixon Quotes

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.

You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.

I let the American people down.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

At home, we must reject the mistaken notion – a notion that has dominated too much of the public dialogue for too long – that ever bigger Government is the answer to every problem.

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.

President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we’re both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.

Let us build bridges, my friends, build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America.

A president can ask for reconciliation in the racial conflict that divides Americans. But reconciliation comes only from the hearts of people.

The answer to many of the domestic problems we face is not higher taxes and more spending. It is less waste, more results and greater freedom for the individual American to earn a rightful place in his own community – and for States and localities to address their own needs in their own ways, in the light of their own priorities.

The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

We are not spending the Federal Government’s money, we are spending the taxpayer’s money, and it must be spent n a way which guarantees his money’s worth and yields the fullest possible benefit to the people being helped.

Tell them to send everything that can fly.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.