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Richard Nixon: The Life QUOTES

Richard Nixon: The Life QUOTES

1 " The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell’s own fire in them. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

2 " Television cameras should be banned from fund-raisers: donors were “rich and fat and drunk and dumb,” Nixon said. “You want to get on TV with the real people, not these sodden looking bastards. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

3 " If this country ever falls into the grasp of a totalitarian dictator it is not likely to come through a Communist revolution,” the editorial said. “It will come because those who profess to believe in freedom are willing to sell their fellow citizens into serfdom for a mess of pottage in the form of political favors from the very radicals who change our form of government. This is exactly what happened in Germany. It is the most dangerous threat to the American way of life in our own country today. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

4 " Of the trials that Eisenhower encountered in politics, McCarthy’s behavior was the most difficult to abide. In his private correspondence, Eisenhower repeatedly conveyed his conviction that the way to curb a demagogue was to ignore him. And, given the separation of powers, the president had few levers to discipline a senator. He could try to rally public opinion, but an open clash would elevate McCarthy and tarnish the presidency. “I personally deal in principles, ideas and national purposes,” Ike told a supporter. “I shall not demean this office by indulging in personal Donnybrooks. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

5 " Nixon was finding enemies everywhere: among liberals, the bureaucracy, on Capitol Hill, and in the press. “We can have peace. We can have prosperity. We can have all the blacks screwing the whites,” and still not get credit from the liberal establishment, he complained. His orders sometimes sounded like the mutterings of a paranoid. He had his staff comb through the microfilm at the D.C. public library and compile every Drew Pearson column dating back to 1946 that mentioned his name. “Agnew must be warned,” Nixon had told Haldeman and others, back during the campaign. “A candidate has no friends in the press—they are all enemies.” He underlined the word no four times. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

6 " Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower said. “This is not a way of life….Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

7 " Well, “maybe it is,” Chotiner wrote, “but the Republican Party must do something more than point out the evils of the administration’s plan—it must show that it is ready to meet the needs of Tom Jones when illness strikes.” And so Congressman Nixon joined with other Republican moderates to introduce a national health insurance plan in which the states and federal governments would subsidize the purchase of insurance from private companies. “Our bill involves neither socialized medicine nor medicine for indigents only,” the announcement said. “It recognizes that the problem of medical care for the people is urgent and that government should participate in its solution. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

8 " Always remember, others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” — "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

9 " Yet few came so far, so fast, so alone, as Nixon. Not the governor of California or his aides, nor any member of the state’s delegation to Congress knew Richard Nixon’s name. He was, he would remember, “somebody who was nothing. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

10 " A reporter from St. Louis passed on a tip that the governor was homosexual. Nixon insisted he would never use it. “Even if I thought there was anything to that story about Stevenson’s being a queer (which I don’t) I wouldn’t dream of allowing it to be used in the campaign,” Nixon wrote back. “This personal stuff (true or false) is below the belt.” But in early September, on a shakedown cruise of New England, Nixon made sport of Stevenson’s masculinity, labeling him “Sidesaddle Adlai” and snorting, “Let the other side serve up the clever quips which send the State Department cocktail set into gales of giggles.”*1 "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

11 " Nixon “didn’t give a damn” about the finer points of domestic policy, said aide Tom Huston. “All he wanted to do was to keep the sharks away.” And so many progressive measures, crafted with the help of his administration, made their way to Nixon’s desk, where he acquiesced, signed his name, and took his just share of the credit. He was no ideologue. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

12 " Dick pulled out his yellow pads, filling line after line with notes and reminders, intent on leaving nothing to chance: Set up budget…office furniture…need for paid workers…call on newspapers, former candidates, leaders…arrange church and lodge and veterans meetings…set up lists for mailings…billboards…bumper stickers…Nixon clubs each town (now)…study V. voting record. This was his hour; his chance to be someone. To excise the hurt. To stake his claim. He needed to win, and his plans revealed his hunger, and an incipient susceptibility to intrigue. Set up…spies in V. camp, he wrote. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

13 " I brought out the dark side of Nixon,” Colson recalled, though “you didn’t need to work very hard to bring it out—it was always close to the surface.” The president was “a gut fighter….His first reaction was to fight back…to get even. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

14 " piratical instincts, "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

15 " as thin as piss on a rock. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

16 " Stevenson and Sparkman were candidates for august offices, Nixon said. They needed to “come before the American people as I have and make a complete financial statement as to their financial history,” he said. “And if they don’t, it will be an admission that they have something to hide.” There "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

17 " Those on the right can do what those on the left talk about,” Nixon replied. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life

18 " Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all of Richard Nixon’s actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible. "

― John A. Farrell , Richard Nixon: The Life