“Deficits, as I’ve often said, aren’t caused by too little taxing, they are caused by too much spending. Presidents don’t create deficits, Congress does. Presidents can’t appropriate a dollar of taxpayers’ money; only congressmen can—and Congress is susceptible to all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with good government.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If there's one observation that rings true in today's changing world, it is that freedom and peace go hand in hand.”
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Ronald Reagan
“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Harry Truman once said: “Find me a one-armed economist, because every one I know always says, ‘Well, on the other hand . . .”
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Ronald Reagan
“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”
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Ronald Reagan
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
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Ronald Reagan
“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.”
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Ronald Reagan
“They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.”
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Ronald Reagan
“It is up to us in our time to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.”
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Ronald Reagan
“As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.”
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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
“I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother—a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos—told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God’s Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn’t let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you’ll find yourself thinking—“If I hadn’t had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn’t have happened to me.”
―
Ronald Reagan
