Ronald Reagan
290 quotes
Biography
"We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added."
"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."
"Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music."
"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone."
"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under."
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
"I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting."
"There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit."
"I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life."
"I've heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?"
"Status quo, you know, is Latin for 'the mess we're in'."
"The future doesn't belong to the light-hearted. It belongs to the brave."
"America is too great for small dreams."
"Back in 1927, an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said that the American people would never vote for socialism but he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program."
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy.""
"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
"Some seem to forget that I’ve worked with those on movies and television. I warn you. Television may be exciting, but always take what you watch or read with a grain of salt. The more extreme these people act, the more money they make. They don’t care about us. You should always do your own research using verified primary sources. Editorials or articles published can be exciting, but they are seldom the truth. This country will eventually be destroyed for the sake of a paycheck."
"So much of our profession is taken up with pretending ... that an actor must spend at least half his waking hours in fantasy."
"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
"Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."
"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."
"I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines."
"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to 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."
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so."
"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a 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."