“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.”

“At my first press conference I was asked whether we could trust the Soviet Union, and I said that the answer to that question could be found in the writings of Soviet leaders: It had always been their philosophy that it was moral to lie or cheat for the purpose of advancing Communism.”

“I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment’s would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.”

“Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way”

“For more than five years, I’d made little progress with my efforts at quiet diplomacy—for one thing, the Soviet leaders kept dying on me.”

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

“While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.”

“Morality in the long run aligned with strategy.”

“I don't believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

“Whatever his reasons, Gorbachev had the intelligence to admit Communism was not working, the courage to battle for change, and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom, and free enterprise. As I said at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, the Soviet Union faced a choice: Either it made fundamental changes or it became obsolete. Gorbachev saw the handwriting on the Wall and opted for change.”

“The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget.”

“If you're explaining, you're losing.”

“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."