"My concern today is not with the length of a person's hair but with his conduct."

"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."

"I've analyzed the best I can... and I have not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an acceptable course."

"Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation."

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

"There will be no whitewash in the White House."

"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."

"Voters quickly forget what a man says."

"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."

"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."

"Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs."

"I don't know anything that builds the will to win better than competitive sports."

"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."

"Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people."

"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."

"Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist."

"Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too."

"The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting."

"People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."

"Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth."

"You've got to learn to survive a defeat. That's when you develop character."

"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."

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

"The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker."

"Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out."

"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."

"By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you've blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time."

"I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business."

"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."

"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."

"Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion."

"A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue."

"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."

"If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents."

"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."

"I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate."

"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."

"Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don't care what they say, they like it."

"I played by the rules of politics as I found them."

"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."

"If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything."

"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."