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Nixon Quotes

Browse 21 quotes about Nixon.

Nixon Quotes

“I know a lot of Americans who would be glad to settle for better bus service from their home to their jobs, or from poor neighborhoods to areas of the city where jobs are to be found. Repeated studies of riots in urban ghettos show that lack of adequate transportation was a big factor in the discontent and bitterness which caused riot conditions to erupt, but President Nixon's answer is to build a space shuttle or an SST with precious public funds, to serve a tiny elite of the population or to stimulate the economy of a state or region by creating massive and useless technological publicworks projects. (From Voices of Multicultural America)”

PovertyEconomyTransportationRiotsRichard NixonNixonGhettos
Author:Shirley Chisholm
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“Many people in Nixon’s camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn’t designed to fail, but it wasn’t designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs.”

CommunityDiversityEqualityEquityHousingAffirmative ActionNixon
Book:Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America
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“I have worked with him [Nixon] in every national campaign in which he has taken part ... And I am deeply grateful for the many kindnesses and courtesies he has shown me over the years. I am not unmindful of the loyalty I owe him." He continued for a few minutes without revealing his position. Then he said, "There are frightening implications for the future of our country if we do not impeach the President of the United States ... If we fail to impeach, we have donned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with reasonable expectations of the American people." "The people of the United States are entitled to assume that their President is telling the truth. The pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths that emerges from our investigation reveals a presidential policy cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable." Rep. Caldwell (Republican from Virginia) then stated that he would vote to impeach Nixon, July 24, 1974”

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Author:Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein
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“Nixon has been the subject of more psychobiographies than any other politician. His career vindicates one of that maligned genre's most trustworthy findings: the recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough.”

PoliticsPoliticiansAmerican PoliticsDaddy IssuesRichard NixonNixon
Book:Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
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“People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us. What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy.”

American PoliticsVice PresidentNixon
Book:Crooked
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“In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.”

PoliticsIdeologyPolitical PartiesConservativesLiberalsNixonPolitical SystemPresidential Administrations
Author:Jeffrey Frank
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“The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II. (From Voices of Multicultural America)”

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Author:Shirley Chisholm
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“Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do. (From Voices of Multicultural America)”

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Author:Shirley Chisholm
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“While David runs the financial end of the Rockefeller dynasty, Nelson runs the political. Nelson would like to be President of the United States. But, unfortunately for him, he is unacceptable to the vast majority of the grass roots of his own party. The next best thing to being President is controlling a President. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon are supposed to be bitter political competitors. In a sense they are, but that still does not preclude Rockefeller from asserting dominion over Mr. Nixon. When Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller competed for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller naturally would have preferred to win the prize, but regardless of who won, he would control the highest office in the land. You will recall that right in the middle of drawing up the Republican platform in 1960, Mr. Nixon suddenly left Chicago and flew to New York to meet with Nelson Rockefeller in what Barry Goldwater described as the "Munich of the Republican Party." There was no political reason why Mr. Nixon needed to crawl to Mr. Rockefeller. He had the convention all sewed up. The Chicago Tribune cracked that it was like Grant surrendering to Lee. In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment…that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communiqué." The meeting produced the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in which the Republican Platform was scrapped and replaced by Rockefeller's socialist plans. The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, commented: "…a little band of conservatives within the party…are shoved to the sidelines… [T]he fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican Party ought to stand for…" As Theodore White put it: "Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see." The whole story behind what happened in Rockefeller's apartment will doubtless never be known. We can only make an educated guess in light of subsequent events. But it is obvious that since that time Mr. Nixon has been in the Rockefeller orbit.”

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Book:None Dare Call It Conspiracy
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“You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72.”

WatergateNixon1972 Presidential CycleGeorge Mcgovern1976 Presidential Cycle
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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“The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives”

NixonPendulum1972 Presidential Cycle
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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“HST: Wasn't there a Harris Poll that showed that only 3 percent of the electorate considered the Watergate thing important? McGovern: Yeah. That's right. Mistakes that we made seemed to be much more costly. I don't know why, but they were. I felt it at the time, that we were being hurt by every mistake we made, whereas the most horrendous kind of things on the other side somehow seemed to--because, I suppose, of the great prestige of the White House, the President's shrewdness in not showing himself to the press or the public--they were able to get away with things that we got pounded for.”

Nixon1972 Presidential CycleMcgovern
Book:Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
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“From 1966 to 1976 ... The primary cause in [the] decline in FBI counterespionage and counterintelligence cases was the ceaseless demand by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to focus on the political warfare against the American left.... - "Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens, 1947-2001, Defense Personnel Security Research Center, July 2002”

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Book:Enemies: A History of the FBI
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