“I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver 5 minutes longer.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If politics were a musical, it would be "Promises, Promises"
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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
“I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that “governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.”
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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
“This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
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Ronald Reagan
“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.”
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Ronald Reagan
“But instead, I decided to give a speech about the pride of giving and the importance of doing things without waiting for the government to do it for you. I pointed out that when individuals or private groups were involved in helping the needy, none of the contributions were spent on overhead or administrative costs, unlike government relief programs where $2 was often spent on overhead for every $1 that went to needy people.”
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Ronald Reagan