“I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.”
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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
“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
“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Just think how happy you'd be if you lost everything you have right now & then got it back.”
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Ronald Reagan
“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.”
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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
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty”
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Ronald Reagan
“I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.”
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Ronald Reagan
“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The Democrats in the legislature agreed with us that welfare costs were headed for the stratosphere but claimed the solution was a huge tax increase—in other words, to keep pouring more money into a bucket that was full of holes.”
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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
