“The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget.”

“These young Americans sent a message to terrorists everywhere. . . . You can run but you can't hide.”

“The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”

“Great things can be accomplished, when it doesnt matter who gets the credit.”

“Here’s my formula: I usually start with a joke or story to catch the audience’s attention; then I tell them what I am going to tell them, I tell them, and then I tell them what I just told them.”

“Just think how happy you'd be if you lost everything you have right now & then got it back.”

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

“America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn.”

“I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party'- when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents”

“But Nancy is right—Presidents don’t have vacations—they just have a change of scenery”

“Together, let us make this a new beginning. Let us make a commitment to care for the needy, to teach our children the values and the virtues handed down to us by our families, to have the courage to defend those values and the willingness to sacrifice for them. Accepting Republican nomination, Detroit, July 17, 1980”

“Met with Jim Watt. He’s taking a lot of abuse from environmental extremists but he’s absolutely right. People are ecology too and they cant forage for food and live in caves.”

“We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief. Nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate."

“I spoke to ears that refused to hear.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”