“Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way”
―
Ronald Reagan
“What would this country be without this great land of ours.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight freedom is on the march.”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Liberty has never come from government,” Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR’s predecessors and another Democrat, said. “The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government’s power, not the increase of it.” Somewhere along the line, the liberal Democrats forgot this and changed their party. It was no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson. The competitive free enterprise system has given us the greatest standard of living in the world, produced generation after generation of technical wizards who consistently lead the world in invention and innovation, and has provided unlimited opportunities enabling industrious Americans from the most humble of backgrounds to climb to the top of the ladder of success. By 1960, I realized the real enemy wasn’t big business, it was big government.
―
Ronald Reagan
“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“But our strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here’s my formula: I usually start with a joke or story to catch the audience’s attention; then I tell them what I am going to tell them, I tell them, and then I tell them what I just told them.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”
―
Ronald Reagan