Ronald Reagan Quotes

There are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

Someday, the realm of liberty and justice will encompass the planet. Freedom is not just the birthright of the few, it is the God-given right of all His children, in every country. It won't come by conquest. It will come, because freedom is right and freedom works. It will come, because cooperation and good will among free people will carry the day.

... Ending a conflict is not so simple, not just calling it off and coming home. Because the price for that kind of peace could be a thousand years of darkness for generation's Viet Nam borned.

People don't start wars, governments do.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.

We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis. The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn't be won by either side. It must never be fought.

The size of the Federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.

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.

As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers.

No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote; but a Republican bucking the giveaway trend might re-create some voters who have been staying home.

When Carter finally agreed to a debate, the date was set for October 28, one week before the election, and we were delighted. The debate went well for me and may have turned on only four little words. They popped out of my mouth after Carter claimed that I had once opposed Medicare benefits for Social Security recipients. It wasn’t true and I said so: “There you go again . . .

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

It (balancing the budget) is like protecting your virtue, you have to learn to say no!