“The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they’ll be more industrious; they’ll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all—and more revenue for government. A few economists call this principle supply-side economics. I just call it common sense.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We are a Nation Under God. If we ever forget this, we are a nation gone UNDER"
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Ronald Reagan
“You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I’m trying to undo the “Great Society.” It was L.B.J.’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. 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. ”
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Ronald Reagan
“My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I was not a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business.”
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Ronald Reagan
“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?
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Ronald Reagan
“These were eye-opening years for me. When I’d come back to Warner Brothers after the war, I’d shared the orthodox liberal view that Communists—if there really were any—were liberals who were temporarily off track, and whatever they were, they didn’t pose much of a threat to me or anyone. I heard whispers that Moscow wanted to infiltrate the world’s most powerful medium of entertainment, but I’d passed them off as irrational and emotional red baiting. Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism.”
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Ronald Reagan
