Top 300 Richard M. Nixon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I believe in building bridges, but we should only build our end of the bridge.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— 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. “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

60. “Before we become too arrogant with the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, the sin of pride, let us remember that the two great wars of this century, wars which cost twenty million dead, were fought between Christian nations praying to the same God.”

— Richard M. Nixon

61. “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

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

65. “Defeat doesn’t finish a man – quit does.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

70. “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

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

74. “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

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

— Richard M. Nixon

76. “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

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Economic power is not the same as strength of national character. Our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit.”

— Richard M. Nixon

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

— Richard M. Nixon

86. “Don’t try to take on a new personality; it doesn’t work.”

— Richard M. Nixon

87. “Honesty may not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in a while.”

— Richard M. Nixon

88. “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

89. “I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.”

— Richard M. Nixon

90. “The Pakistanis are straightforward and sometimes extremely stupid. The Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line.”

— Richard M. Nixon

91. “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

92. “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

93. “We seek friendly relations with all nations. Any nation can be our friend without being any other nation’s enemy.”

— Richard M. Nixon

94. “The ultimate test of a nation’s character is not how it responds to adversity in war but how it meets the challenge of peace.”

— Richard M. Nixon

95. “Peace is the real and right memorial for those who have died in war.”

— Richard M. Nixon

96. “Government can provide opportunity. But opportunity means nothing unless people are prepared to seize it.”

— Richard M. Nixon

97. “I hereby resign this office of president of the United States.”

— Richard M. Nixon

98. “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador, wants to pay at least $250,000.”

— Richard M. Nixon

99. “Nobody is a friend of ours. Let’s face it.”

— Richard M. Nixon

100. “America will not tolerate being pushed around by anybody, anyplace.”

— Richard M. Nixon