“Many countries of the world, I said, had constitutions, but in almost every case they were documents in which governments told their people what they could do. The United States had a constitution, I said, that was different from all the others because in it the people tell their government what it can do. Its three most important words are “We the people,” its most important principle, freedom.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“They had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." on Challenger disaster”
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Ronald Reagan
“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
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Ronald Reagan
“But our strategy for peace with freedom must also be based on strength—economic strength and military strength.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. ”
―
Ronald Reagan
“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.”
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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
“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
“If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.”
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Ronald Reagan
“Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I'm a gooey, gushy gumdrop bullshitty drop bombs on Russia! ride a horse ...”
―
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.”
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Ronald Reagan
“I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
―
Ronald Reagan
