Ronald Reagan Quotes

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.

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.

I grew up in a town where everyone cared about one another because everyone knew one another, not as statistics in a government program but as neighbors in need. Is that nostalgic? I don't think so.

We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.

I never knew anything above Cs.

Met with Jim Watt. He’s taking a lot of abuse from environmental extremists but he’s absolutely right. People are ecology too and they cant forage for food and live in caves.

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.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities.

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Read this morning of a black family — husband and wife both work in govt. printing office. They live in a nice house near U. of Maryland. They have been harassed and even had a cross burned on their lawn. It was all on the front page of the “Post.” I told Mike & Jim I’d like to call on them. We cleared the last part of the afternoon schedule & Nancy & I went calling. They were a very nice couple with a 4 year old daughter — grandma (a most gracious lady) lived with them. Their home was very nice & tastefully furnished. They were very nice about our coming & expressed their thanks. The whole neighborhood was lining the street — most of them cheering and applauding us. I hope we did some good. There is no place in this land for the hate-mongers & bigots.

It's reported that John Adams' last words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives." History tells us, however, that Jefferson had died shortly before John Adams passed away. But Adams was right. All of us stand in tribute to the truth of those words. We proclaim it again and again with our dedication to keeping this a land of liberty and justice for all, and through our deeds and actions, to ensure that this country remains a bastion of freedom, the last best hope for mankind. As long as a love of liberty is emblazoned on our hearts, Jefferson lives.

The only way there could be war is if they start it; we're not going to start a war.

Let's close the place down and see if anybody notices.

We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?