Top 300 Richard M. Nixon Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?”

— Richard M. Nixon

52. “What a strange creature man is that he fouls his own nest.”

— Richard M. Nixon

53. “If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but, rather because of what we believe.”

— Richard M. Nixon

54. “If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.”

— Richard M. Nixon

55. “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.”

— Richard M. Nixon

56. “I would have made a good pope.”

— Richard M. Nixon

57. “Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second rate president.”

— Richard M. Nixon

58. “You cannot win a battle in any arena merely by defending yourself.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

60. “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government, you can’t believe what they say, and you can’t rely on their judgment.”

— Richard M. Nixon

61. “Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.”

— Richard M. Nixon

62. “I don’t know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.”

— Richard M. Nixon

63. “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word “crisis.” One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

65. “History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties.”

— Richard M. Nixon

66. “The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man.”

— Richard M. Nixon

67. “They say it’s the responsibility of the media to look at government – especially the President – with a microscope. I don’t argue with that, but when they use a proctoscope, it’s going too far.”

— Richard M. Nixon

68. “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.”

— Richard M. Nixon

69. “I’ve never left a game before it ended. You never know when there could be a big turnaround in the game.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

71. “The developing coherence of Asian regional thinking is reflected in a disposition to consider problems and loyalties in regional terms, and to evolve regional approaches to development needs and to the evolution of a New World Order.”

— Richard M. Nixon

72. “The three most difficult words to speak are, “I was wrong.””

— Richard M. Nixon

73. “I don’t give a damn about the civilians.”

— Richard M. Nixon

74. “I don’t know a lot about politics, but I know a lot about baseball.”

— Richard M. Nixon

75. “If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?”

— Richard M. Nixon

76. “A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not always his enemies.”

— Richard M. Nixon

77. “I really believe life is simple. It’s all the other people that make things complicated.”

— Richard M. Nixon

78. “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.”

— Richard M. Nixon

79. “I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.”

— Richard M. Nixon

80. “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all of the people on this earth are truly one. One in their pride at what you have done, one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

82. “Let us remember that the main purpose of American aid is not to help other nations, but to help ourselves.”

— Richard M. Nixon

83. “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely.”

— Richard M. Nixon

84. “I believe in building bridges, but we should only build our end of the bridge.”

— Richard M. Nixon

85. “I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.”

— Richard M. Nixon

86. “My gravest secret is that I really did fake the moon landing. On Venus!”

— Richard M. Nixon

87. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.”

— Richard M. Nixon

88. “Any nation that decides the only way to achieve peace is through peaceful means is a nation that will soon be a piece of another nation.”

— Richard M. Nixon

89. “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.”

— Richard M. Nixon

90. “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.”

— Richard M. Nixon

91. “I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes.”

— Richard M. Nixon

92. “Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

94. “No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”

— Richard M. Nixon

95. “Maybe New York shouldn’t survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction.”

— Richard M. Nixon

96. “A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life’s mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.”

— Richard M. Nixon

97. “Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.”

— Richard M. Nixon

98. “The communists have lost the cold war, but the west has not yet won it.”

— Richard M. Nixon

99. “The 1970s must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.”

— Richard M. Nixon

100. “You must never give up. You must remember that you have to take risks in order to achieve anything and sometimes you will suffer defeat. But the mark of any individual is to recover from defeat and disappointment and go on and give it his best shot.”

— Richard M. Nixon