“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The key for any speaker is to establish his own point of view for the audience, so they can see the game through his eyes.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Democracy triumphed in the cold war because it was a battle of values—between one system that gave preeminence to the state and another that gave preeminence to the individual and freedom. Not long ago, I was told about an incident that illustrated this difference: An American scholar, on his way to the airport before a flight to the Soviet Union, got into a conversation with his cab driver, a young man who said that he was still getting his education. The scholar asked, “When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?” The young man answered, “I haven’t decided yet.” After the scholar arrived at the airport in Moscow, his cab driver was also a young man who happened to mention he was still getting his education, and the scholar, who spoke Russian, asked, “When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?” The young man answered: “They haven’t told me yet.”
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Ronald Reagan
“BY THE EARLY 1960S, GE was receiving more speaking invitations for me from around the country than I could handle. And, although I was still saying the same things that I’d said for six years during the Eisenhower administration, I was suddenly being called a “right-wing extremist.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Throughout my life, I guess there’s been one thing that’s troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else. I probably got it from my father; Jack never bristled more than when he thought working people were being exploited.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.”
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Ronald Reagan
