“I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.”
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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
“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
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
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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
“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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen. ”
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Ronald Reagan
“This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”
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Ronald Reagan
“James Madison said in 1788: “Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
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Ronald Reagan
Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“But Nancy is right—Presidents don’t have vacations—they just have a change of scenery”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.”
―
Ronald Reagan
