“There are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“aren’t lazy or unwilling to work: they just don’t know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.”
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Ronald Reagan
“The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I hope when you are my age, you’ll be able to say - as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. Our lives were a statement, not an apology.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“America is, and always will be, a shining city on a hill.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Together, let us make this a new beginning. Let us make a commitment to care for the needy, to teach our children the values and the virtues handed down to us by our families, to have the courage to defend those values and the willingness to sacrifice for them. Accepting Republican nomination, Detroit, July 17, 1980”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.”
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Ronald Reagan
“We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.”
―
Ronald Reagan
