“On the streets of Moscow, looking into thousands of faces, I was reminded once again that it’s not people who make war, but governments—and people deserve governments that fight for peace in the nuclear age.”

“I thanked Nancy for what she had accomplished in her war against illegal drugs, but in my heart, I was really trying to say, “Thank you, Nancy, for everything; thank you for lighting up my life for almost forty years.”

“I was not a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”

“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.”

"I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”

“While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.”

“Never let the things you can't do, stop you from doing what you can.”

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.”

“We do more for the under developed nations than anyone in the world but they act as if we’re out to destroy them and they never say boo to the Soviets.”

“For more than five years, I’d made little progress with my efforts at quiet diplomacy—for one thing, the Soviet leaders kept dying on me.”

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.”

“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

“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.”