“It is true that I opposed quotas in employment, education, and other areas. I consider quotas, whether they favor blacks or whites, men or women, to be a new form of discrimination as bad as the old ones.”

“Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

“There are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.”

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”

“If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.”

“Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”

“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.”

“I have no recollection of that ever happening.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing” 

“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

“Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

“I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.”