“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
“In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America's is.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I'm a gooey, gushy gumdrop bullshitty drop bombs on Russia! ride a horse ...”
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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
“America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.”
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Ronald Reagan
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. ”
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Ronald Reagan
“More than a decade ago, a Supreme Court decision literally wiped off the books of fifty states statutes protecting the rights of unborn children. Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to 1.5 million unborn children a year. Human life legislation ending this tragedy will some day pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does. Unless and until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be protected.”
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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 most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
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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
“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.”
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Ronald Reagan
