A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.
A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.
Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.
Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.
Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it.
As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.
By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you’ve blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time.
Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.
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.
Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits.
Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
I am not a crook.
I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.
I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.
I can see clearly now… that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.
I don’t know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.
I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.
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.
I have impeached myself by resigning.
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.
I let the American people down.
I played by the rules of politics as I found them.
I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.
I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don’t have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.
I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.
I’ve analyzed the best I can… and I have not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an acceptable course.
I’ve never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have any newspapers or magazines to read.
If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything.
If I were to make public these tapes, containing blunt and candid remarks on many different subjects, the confidentiality of the office of the president would always be suspect.
If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.
If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
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.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.
Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.
Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.
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.
My concern today is not with the length of a person’s hair but with his conduct.
My own view is that taping of conversations for historical purposes was a bad decision on the part of all the presidents. I don’t think Kennedy should have done it. I don’t think Johnson should have done it, and I don’t think we should have done it.
My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.
Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
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.
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.
Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.
People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I earned everything I’ve got.
People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.
Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people.
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.
Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.
Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
Solutions are not the answer.
Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.
Tell them to send everything that can fly.
The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.
The Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.
The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.
The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.
The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.
The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.
The press is the enemy.
There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.
There will be no whitewash in the White House.
Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
Tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support.
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.
Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.
Voters quickly forget what a man says.
Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.
We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
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.
Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?
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.
When I retire I’m going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned.
When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.
You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates.
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.
You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.
