“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”

“Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.”

“I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.”

“The key for any speaker is to establish his own point of view for the audience, so they can see the game through his eyes.”

“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“In a country ruled by laws, it seemed to me that nothing was more important than removing politics from the process of choosing judges. During previous administrations in California, governors had often handed out judgeships to friends and cronies like prizes at a company picnic. Not only had this produced a lot of inferior judges, it had placed a number of partisans on the bench who believed that putting on the black robes of a judge gave them a license to rewrite the laws. I wanted judges who would interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it.”

“Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.”

“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.”

“These young Americans sent a message to terrorists everywhere. . . . You can run but you can't hide.”

“Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I—granted the rules were violated at times—we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn’t make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler’s philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.”

“They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

“The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”

“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.”

“In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America's is.”

“Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”