“The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty”
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Ronald Reagan
“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
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Ronald Reagan
“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother—a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos—told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God’s Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn’t let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you’ll find yourself thinking—“If I hadn’t had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn’t have happened to me.”
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Ronald Reagan
“These young Americans sent a message to terrorists everywhere. . . . You can run but you can't hide.”
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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
“The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”
―
Ronald Reagan
