“aren’t lazy or unwilling to work: they just don’t know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“But our strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.
―
Ronald Reagan
“America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty”
―
Ronald Reagan
