“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Democracy triumphed in the cold war because it was a battle of values—between one system that gave preeminence to the state and another that gave preeminence to the individual and freedom. Not long ago, I was told about an incident that illustrated this difference: An American scholar, on his way to the airport before a flight to the Soviet Union, got into a conversation with his cab driver, a young man who said that he was still getting his education. The scholar asked, “When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?” The young man answered, “I haven’t decided yet.” After the scholar arrived at the airport in Moscow, his cab driver was also a young man who happened to mention he was still getting his education, and the scholar, who spoke Russian, asked, “When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?” The young man answered: “They haven’t told me yet.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“A rebuke to Cong. “How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing & talk by the hour.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“If there's one observation that rings true in today's changing world, it is that freedom and peace go hand in hand.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“I’ve laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“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.”
―
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
“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that “governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.”
―
Ronald Reagan
“For the average American, the message is clear. Liberalism is no longer the answer. It is the problem.”
―
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
