“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?
―
Ronald Reagan
“Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Later, several members of the Communist Party in Hollywood who had been involved in the attempted takeover went public and described in intimate detail how Moscow was trying to take over the picture business.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“We do more for the under developed nations than anyone in the world but they act as if we’re out to destroy them and they never say boo to the Soviets.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
