Nixon Quotes

1. "America experienced its first oil shock. Within days of the cutoff, oil prices rose from $2.90 to $11.65 a barrel; gasoline prices soared from 20 cents to $1.20 a gallon, an all-time high. Across America, fuel shortages forced factories to close early and airlines to cancel flights. Filling stations posted signs: 'Sorry, No Gas Today.' If a station did have gasoline, motorists lined up before sunrise to buy a few gallons; owners limited the amount sold to each customer. Motorists grew impatient. Fistfights broke out, and occasionally, gunfire. President Nixon called for America to end its dependence on foreign oil. 'Let us set as our national goal. . . that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source,' he said. We have still not met this goal."
Author: Albert Marrin

2. "There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder."
Author: Andrew Tobias

3. "My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page... up to the very last line... Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is it fair picture of human life. I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange-meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil... It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice... Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities."
Author: Anthony Burgess

4. "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."
Author: Austin Grossman

5. "I wouldn't trust Nixon from here to that phone."
Author: Barry Goldwater

6. "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."
Author: Bayard Rustin

7. "Nixon probably was a nice guy."
Author: Bill Ayers

8. "They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally."
Author: Bill Bryson

9. "Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's."
Author: Bob Gunton

10. "I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater."
Author: Bob Gunton

11. "He never really voice pure, raw outrage to me about Watergate or what it represented. The crimes and abuses were background music. Nixon was trying to subvert not only the law but the Bureau. So Watergate became Felt's instrument to reassert the Bureau's independence and thus its supremacy. In the end, the Bureau was damaged, seriously but not permanently, while Nixon lost much more, maybe everything - the presidency, power, and whatever moral authority he might have had. He was disgraced. But surviving and enduring his hidden life, in contrast and in his own way, Mark Felt won."
Author: Bob Woodward

12. "What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh."
Author: Bruce Vilanch

13. "For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.' As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."
Author: Carl Sagan

14. "A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?"
Author: Christopher Hitchens

15. "Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam."
Author: Daniel Ellsberg

16. "Walter rolled his eyes. "Sack up, kid." "Amen, Whitman," Nixon agreed."
Author: David Edison

17. "Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times."
Author: David Halberstam

18. "Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label."
Author: Drew Carey

19. "It became evident to me that there was a very serious political element at work. I know that the term impeachment was bandied about. I do not believe, however, that the word was used with the ferocity it was more recently or that it was in the Nixon years."
Author: Fred F. Fielding

20. "Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]"
Author: Gore Vidal

21. "For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died."
Author: Hanif Kureishi

22. "They call each other `E.' Elvis pickswildflowers near the river and bringsthem to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sportsLevis and western blouses with rhinestones.Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousersand T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.They take long walks and often hold hands.She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and RichardNixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoonhe will play guitar and sing "I Taste A LiquorNever Brewed" to the tune of "Love Me Tender."Emily will clap and harmonize. Alonein their cabins later, they'll listen to the riverand nap. They will not think of Amherstor Las Vegas. They know why God made themroommates. It's because Americawas their hometown. It's becauseGod is a thing withoutfeathers. It's becauseGod wears blue suede shoes."
Author: Hans Ostrom

23. "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."
Author: Harry S. Truman

24. "I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate."
Author: Helen Thomas

25. "It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes to close…"
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

26. "Nixon's offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving."
Author: Jacob M. Appel

27. "I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times."
Author: James Crumley

28. "Holy Mary, mother of God," my mother said. "You were being chased by Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and a rabbit."
Author: Janet Evanovich

29. "If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon."
Author: Jeff Greenfield

30. "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."
Author: Jeff Greenfield

31. "Dukakis." A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

32. "I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China."
Author: John Pomfret

33. "If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it."
Author: Ken Hollings

34. "I might say that when the settlement was made the Nixon administration issued what they called a second inflation alert in which the General Motors settlement was branded as being inflationary and bad for the country."
Author: Leonard Woodcock

35. "He's [Nixon] like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards. You'll see; he'll do something wrong in the end. He always does."
Author: Lyndon B. Johnson

36. "Bill Clinton was lucky in many ways; but when it came to former presidents, he won the lottery. When he was elected president, he had five former commanders in chief at his disposal: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the most of any president in the twentieth century. Not all of them had been helpful to one another, in or out of office. But some combination of his charm, their needs, and the new global challenges of the post–Cold War age allowed Clinton to deploy nearly all to his advantage—especially, as it turned out, the Republicans."
Author: Nancy Gibbs

37. "The death of JFK to the resignation of Richard Nixon marked a great turning point in American life."
Author: Pierre Salinger

38. "Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments."
Author: Rick Perlstein

39. "What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction."
Author: Robert D. Kaplan

40. "The reason I'm a Nixonite is because of his indestructibility and resilience. He never quit."
Author: Roger Stone

41. "Of course a lot of the journalists hated Nixon, but they were always blown away by how smart he was."
Author: Roger Stone

42. "That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man."
Author: Solomon Burke

43. "I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary - a good combination for a teacher."
Author: Stephen Mangan

44. "We all obviously need others to look up to, and be inspirational to us. Ford did a great job as far as putting the presidency back where it belonged, getting the trust back after Nixon. And President Reagan has been one of the most influential presidents."
Author: Steve Garvey

45. "I don't remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on."
Author: Stewart Udall

46. "Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good."
Author: Stewart Udall

47. "What? -- RICHARD M NIXON"
Author: Thomas Pynchon

48. "My mom was a Democrat and I was scared to death that she was gonna blow it. First I was going to hell with Monroe, and now to Republican hell with Nixon."
Author: Tommy Rettig

49. "I think we're at risk with our democracy. I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."
Author: Wesley Clark

50. "Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back."
Author: William O. Douglas

Nixon Quotes Pictures