“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
“I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I'm a gooey, gushy gumdrop bullshitty drop bombs on Russia! ride a horse ...”
―
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.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
―
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
“You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“aren’t lazy or unwilling to work: they just don’t know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.”
―
Ronald Reagan
Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I don't think we'll solve the problem of the deficit until three things happen: We need more discipline on spending in Congress. We need a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. And we need to give our presidents a line-item veto.”
―
Ronald Reagan