“Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.”
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Ronald Reagan
“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”
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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
“Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.”
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Ronald Reagan
“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
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Ronald Reagan
“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.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.”
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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
“Throughout my life, I guess there’s been one thing that’s troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else. I probably got it from my father; Jack never bristled more than when he thought working people were being exploited.”
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Ronald Reagan
“There probably isn’t any undertaking on earth short of assuring the national security that can’t be handled more efficiently by the forces of private enterprise than by the federal government.”
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Ronald Reagan
“In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America's is.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
―
Ronald Reagan
