“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”

“I'm a gooey, gushy gumdrop bullshitty drop bombs on Russia! ride a horse ...”

“We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief. Nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate."

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.” 

“In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America's is.”

“I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment’s would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.”

“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.”

“I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party'- when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents”

“Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.”

“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.” 

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”

“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”