“Liberty has never come from government,” Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR’s predecessors and another Democrat, said. “The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government’s power, not the increase of it.” Somewhere along the line, the liberal Democrats forgot this and changed their party. It was no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson. The competitive free enterprise system has given us the greatest standard of living in the world, produced generation after generation of technical wizards who consistently lead the world in invention and innovation, and has provided unlimited opportunities enabling industrious Americans from the most humble of backgrounds to climb to the top of the ladder of success. By 1960, I realized the real enemy wasn’t big business, it was big government.
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Ronald Reagan
“Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way”
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Ronald Reagan
“I believe with all my heart that standing up for America means standing up for the God who has so blessed our land. We need God’s help to guide our nation through stormy seas. But we can’t expect Him to protect America in a crisis if we just leave Him over on the shelf in our day-to-day living. Speech, New Orleans, November 16, 1982”
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Ronald Reagan
“I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Status quo, you know, is Latin for 'the mess we're in'.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If there's one observation that rings true in today's changing world, it is that freedom and peace go hand in hand.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”
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Ronald Reagan
“aren’t lazy or unwilling to work: they just don’t know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.”
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Ronald Reagan
“To sit back hoping that someday, someway, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last - but eat you he will.”
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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
“I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.”
―
Ronald Reagan
