“We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won”

“Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?

“What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in their struggles along the way; yes, it’s what they learned from failing.”

“Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem.”

“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.”

“Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.”

“Seamstresses had been working all night making uniforms for me. As I waited to be fitted, I looked over at a rack of uniforms tagged with the word “Custer” and the name of another actor. I watched a wardrobe man come in and gather up the uniforms, toss them like rags in a corner, and replace them on the rack with blue and gold-braided uniforms marked “Custer” with my name on them. I looked at those uniforms piled up on the floor and said to myself: “That can happen to me some day.”

“Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?

“Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.”

“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.”

“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.”

“I more than love you, I’m not whole without you. You are life itself to me. When you are gone I’m waiting for you to return so I can start living again.” 

“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."

“The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.” 

“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.”