Theodore White Quotes

Choose the politics of principle over the politics of personality.

I don't want to rust out, I'd rather wear out.

In many respects, designing heirloom products means saying no to designing consumer crap that you know will not last very long.

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Your image isn't your character. Character is what you are as a person.

There's a basic law, Klein's second, or third, or fourth law of politics in the TV age, which is warm always beats cold, with the exception of Richard Nixon. The nicer guy usually wins.

I read all the time that people think I'm arrogant. They say I am cocky, a bad character. I had that from a young age. But when they meet me, they say, 'That image doesn't fit you.'

An old building is like a show. You smell the soul of a building. And the building tells you how to redo it.

Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.

This mode of electioneering suited neither my taste nor my principles. I though it equally unsuitable to my personal character and to the station in which I am placed.

[Richard M.] Nixon is a naive, inept, maladjusted Throttlebottom.

Certainly he [Richard M. Nixon] is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy.

Nixon's pretense was to be less than he was—less thoughtful, less introverted, less skeptical and analytical, less cerebral—to present himself deliberately as an Average American: patriotic, conventionally religious and responsible, gregarious, sports-loving, hardworking and hard-nosed.

[Describing George W. Bush:] The Resume That Walks Like a Man.

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.

Don't believe anything they write about you, good or bad.

The place needs a complete overhaul.

Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.

The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.

If Trump remains honest and seems like a person who's authentic, he's going to go a long way.

It's not the years honey, it's the mileage.

When Hillary Clinton tried to act holier than thou, it really doesn't work. It really doesn't.

Nothing lasts forever, but old Fords and a natural stone.

So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.