Ronald Reagan Quotes (308 Quotes)


    It was leadership here at home that gave us strong American influence abroad, and the collapse of imperial Communism. Great nations have responsibilities to lead, and we should always be cautious of those who would lower our profile, because they might just wind up lowering our flag. (RNC Annual Gala, Feb. 3, 1994)

    Some people wonder all their lives if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem.

    We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look. (January 20, 1981)

    Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

    A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?


    There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge

    Government has laid its hand on health, housing, farming, industry, commerce, education, and to an ever-increasing degree interferes with the people's right to know. Government tends to grow, government programs take on weight and momentum as public servants say, always with the best of intentions. But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or economically as the private sector of the economy.

    Governments don't reduce deficits by raising taxes on the people governments reduce deficits by controlling spending and stimulating new wealth.

    Let us resolve that we will stop spreading dependency and start spreading opportunity that we will stop spreading bondage and start spreading freedom.

    Our Constitution is to be celebrated not for being old, but for being young.

    The most effective president, he told Forbes magazine 11 months ago, was Harry Truman, because everybody who worked for him worshiped him because he was absolutely trustworthy. ... His great strength was not charisma, as is commonly thought, but his awareness and acceptance of exactly what he could do and what he could not do.


    The Soviet Union is an Evil Empire, and Soviet communism is the focus of evil in the modern world

    Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

    We will never forget them nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.'

    Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right.

    Draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending.

    We need you, we need your youth, your strength, and your idealism, to help us make right what is wrong.

    They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

    Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.

    The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.

    It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

    Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy accommodation. And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. . . . We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave-masters.

    Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

    No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

    Double, no triple, our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth. It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.

    I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

    There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

    Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act.

    Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

    I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience. Laughter and applause If I still have time, I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don't know which, that said, If it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.''


    The history of our civilization, the great advances that made it possible, is not a story of cynics or doom criers. It is a gallant chronicle of the optimists, the determined people, men and women, who dreamed great dreams and dared to try whatever it took to make them come true.

    Putting people first has always been America's secret weapon. It's the way we've kept the spirit of our revolutions alive -- a spirit that drives us to dream and dare, and take great risks for a greater good.

    How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

    The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

    A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.

    Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom. What brought America back The American people brought us back -- with quiet courage and common sense with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.


    An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory.

    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.

    Someone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable Are we in truth losing our virtue . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize.

    You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a 1000 years of darkness.

    Most (tax revisions) didn't improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself complicated

    However, our task is far from over. Our friends in the other party will never forgive us for our success, and are doing everything in their power to rewrite history. Listening to the liberals, you'd think that the 1980's were the worst period since the Gr

    A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

    Today we Americans lost a hero who always seemed larger than life. ... Bear Bryant gave his country the gift of a life unsurpassed. In making the impossible seem easy, he lived what we strive to be.

    We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars It is better to be here in Europe ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.

    And make no mistake about it, this attack was not just against ourselves or the Republic of Korea. This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations.

    History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.


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