Quotes from Richard M. Nixon

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.

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.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Isn't it better to talk about the relative merits of washing machines than the relative strength of rockets?

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.

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.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.

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.

Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism.

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.

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.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

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

When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.

The press is the enemy.

You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

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.

Listen, I don't know anything about polygraphs and I don't know how accurate they are, but I know they'll scare the hell out of people.

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.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

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.

Yet we can maintain a free society only if we recognize that in a free society no one can win all the time. No one can have his own way all the time, and no one is right all the time.

I really believe life is simple. It's all the other people that make things complicated.