“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
“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
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Ronald Reagan
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I couldn t help but say to Mr. Gorbachev just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. We d find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together”
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Ronald Reagan
“Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.”
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Ronald Reagan
“if there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy’s budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn’t spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers’ expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn’t be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before.”
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Ronald Reagan
“It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”
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Ronald Reagan
“My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
