“It is up to us in our time to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”
―
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
“Trust me” government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs — in the people. The responsibility to live up to that trust is where it belongs, in their elected leaders. That kind of relationship, between the people and their elected leaders, is a special kind of compact.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Great things can be accomplished, when it doesnt matter who gets the credit.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“But Nancy is right—Presidents don’t have vacations—they just have a change of scenery”
―
Ronald Reagan
“We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
―
Ronald Reagan
“The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”
―
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
“I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.”
―
Ronald Reagan
