Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon’s line lands like a scrubbed-up confession delivered before anyone can ask where the bleach came from. “I reject” is the tell: not “politics isn’t dirty,” but a personal act of refusal, as if grime is a philosophy you can opt out of. The phrase “cynical view” frames skepticism as a temperament problem, not a response to evidence. It’s a classic political maneuver: delegitimize the audience’s suspicion by treating it as a moral failing.

Coming from a president whose name became shorthand for executive corruption, the sentence reads as both aspiration and preemptive self-defense. Nixon is trying to reclaim the idea of politics as vocation - work that can be tough without being rotten - while also laundering his own legitimacy through that higher claim. The subtext isn’t innocence; it’s discipline. Nixon always sold the image of the striver who believes in institutions hard enough to deserve them. Here, “dirty business” doubles as a jab at opponents and the press: you’re the ones smearing the enterprise, not me.

Context sharpens the irony. In an era when Vietnam, protests, and distrust were curdling public faith, insisting politics isn’t filthy functions as a stabilizing spell. It asks citizens to keep investing emotional capital in a system that keeps disappointing them. The line works rhetorically because it offers moral clarity without specifics: no reforms, no admissions, just a clean, declarative stand - the kind of cleanliness that, in Nixon’s case, invites everyone to check their hands.