John Dean Quotes

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

It was accountability that Nixon feared.

We can be lied to only so many times. The best thing that he [President Nixon] can do for the country is to get the hell out of the White House and get out this afternoon.

Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

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

Nixon's grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped.

I don’t know what he was so angry about. He won…. If I had won, he would have been much better off. He would have been spared getting disgraced by Watergate.

As I watched some of the Watergate hearings I kept asking myself what all these people—[John] Dean and others—were doing there in the first place. Was there really an honest job that needed doing?

What is this "Watergate?

Oppositions clean and purify those in office and we in the opposition are in fact the detergents of democracy.

The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse

As long as government exists, corruption will exist. It is an illness of government and can only be cured by the people.

Senator Howard Baker selected me to be the Republicans’ lawyer in the Watergate hearings, and the Republicans really needed lawyers then.

You roll back the stones and you find the slithering things of the world of Richard Nixon.

The Watergate burglary was both illegal and stupid

I grew up during Watergate. I was enamored of the study of that.

I think there are periods in this country when behavior is abhorrent: McCarthy, Watergate, Bill Clinton. It's just a question of how the checks and balances in the American system work and how leaders stand up to it or don't stand up to it.

If the president does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available.

The reality is I believe there has never been in the history of our White House such an unscrupulous pair as what I witnessed in this White House.

Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations.

All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.

There's a cancer on the presidency.

The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.