The 40 Best Quotes from Ronald Reagan

The 40 Best Quotes from Ronald Reagan
By John Hawkins
7/3/2012

40) "A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah."

39) "The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become."

38) "When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat."

37) "Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence."

36) "A taxpayer is someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take a civil-service exam."

35) "One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it."

34) "I am paying for this microphone…!" (When a debate moderator threatened to cut off his mike at a debate he paid for.)

33) " I want you to know 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.” (To Walter Mondale at a debate)

32) "One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government's primary concerns."

31) "There you go again." (Reagan to Jimmy Carter in a debate)

30) "I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting."

29) "Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement."

28) "Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying."

27) "If you're explaining, you're losing."

26) "I hope we have once again 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."

25) "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."

24) "Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives."

23) "The ultimate determinate in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas - a trial of spiritual resolve; the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideas to which we are dedicated."

22) "If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth."

21) "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

20) "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them -- this morning, as they prepared for their journey, and waved good-bye, and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'" (Speech about the Challenger disaster).

19) "Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

18) "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so."

17) "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

16) "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."

15) "Trust, but verify."

14) "I hope you're all Republicans." (to surgeons as he entered the operating room following his assassination attempt)

13) "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes." (Said during a radio microphone test, 1984)

12) "The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray to God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest."

11) "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."

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

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

8) "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."

7) “Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”

6) "Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong."

5) "Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong."

4) "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

3) "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

2) "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."

1) "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
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