“Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Tax increases don’t eliminate deficits they increase govt. spending.”
―
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.”
―
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
“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“The Democrats in the legislature agreed with us that welfare costs were headed for the stratosphere but claimed the solution was a huge tax increase—in other words, to keep pouring more money into a bucket that was full of holes.”
―
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
“For more than five years, I’d made little progress with my efforts at quiet diplomacy—for one thing, the Soviet leaders kept dying on me.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here’s my formula: I usually start with a joke or story to catch the audience’s attention; then I tell them what I am going to tell them, I tell them, and then I tell them what I just told them.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I was not a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”
―
Ronald Reagan
