“Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that “governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.”
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Ronald Reagan
“AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, I was a New Dealer to the core. I thought government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn’t trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn’t enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
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Ronald Reagan
“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”
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Ronald Reagan
“Many countries of the world, I said, had constitutions, but in almost every case they were documents in which governments told their people what they could do. The United States had a constitution, I said, that was different from all the others because in it the people tell their government what it can do. Its three most important words are “We the people,” its most important principle, freedom.”
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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
“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing”
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Ronald Reagan
“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known.”
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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
“These were eye-opening years for me. When I’d come back to Warner Brothers after the war, I’d shared the orthodox liberal view that Communists—if there really were any—were liberals who were temporarily off track, and whatever they were, they didn’t pose much of a threat to me or anyone. I heard whispers that Moscow wanted to infiltrate the world’s most powerful medium of entertainment, but I’d passed them off as irrational and emotional red baiting. Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of our world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.”
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Ronald Reagan
