A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.
Richard M. Nixon
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Richard M. Nixon quotes
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man's world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and Tranquillity to Earth.
I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
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.
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
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.
A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning.
A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.
A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.
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.
A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
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 far as I am concerned now, I have no enemies in the press whatsoever.
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 taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the healing.
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.
Don't try to take on a new personality; it doesn't work.
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
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.
Get a good night's sleep and don't bug anybody without asking me.
I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority viewpoint-no matter how distasteful to the majority, provided...
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 take it... The tougher it gets, the cooler I get...
I concede!
I don't know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports.
I doubt if any of them would even intentionally double-park.
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 had come so far from the little house in Yorba Linda to this great house in Washington.
I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.
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 hereby resign this office of president of the United States.
I knew if I continued to look around it would be difficult for me to contain my own emotions. So I turned away from the red eyes of the crowd and looked only at the red eye of the camera, talking to all the nation.
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 think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others she was a saint.
I took a look around the office. I walked out and closed the door behind me. I knew that I would not be back there again.
I turned into the helicopter the red carpet was rolled up. The White House was behind us now.
I want you to stonewall it.
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 would have made a good Pope.
I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but I'd bet the main house. I wouldn't even bet the outhouse on Mondale.
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 have lower than a ten percent turnover, there is a problem. And if you have higher than, say 20%, there is a problem.
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
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 not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.
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.
It's the responsibility of the media to look at the president with a microscope, but they go too far when they use a proctoscope.
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.
My strong point is not rhetoric, it isn't showmanship, it isn't big promises-those things that create the glamour and the excitement that people call charisma and warmth.
My telephone calls and meetings and decisions were now parts of a prescribed ritual aimed at making peace with the past; his calls, his meetings and his decisions were already the ones that would shape America's future.
My view is that one should not break up a winning combination.
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.
Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.
Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain --if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.
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 in the media say they must look at the president with a microscope. Now, I don't mind a microscope, but boy, when they use a proctoscope, that's going too far.
People see me and they think, "He's risen from the dead."
People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like.
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.
Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much.
Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance.
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 1976 Bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the Government Printing Office and mailed to you by the United States Postal Service.
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 greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
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 one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.
The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.
The press is the enemy.
The student who invades an administration building, roughs up a dean, rifles the files and issues "nonnegotiable demands" may have some of his demands met by a permissive university administration. But the greater his "victory" the more he will have undermined the security of his own rights.
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.
They say, "Gee, you look great." That means they thought you looked like hell before.
This is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.
This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.
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 are all in it together. This is a war. We take a few shots and it will be over. We will give them a few shots and it will be over.
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 does that candyass think I sent him over there for?
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 grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that can't happen.
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.
When the winds blow and the rains fall and the sun shines through the clouds he still resolves as he did then, that nothing so fine ever happened to him or anyone else as falling in love with Thee-my dearest heart.
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 see these bums, you know, blowing up campuses storming around about this issue.
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.
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