Quotes from Ronald Reagan

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

The following morning, when I met for breakfast with the staff, we kept noisy music playing loudly on a tape recorder as a precaution against hidden microphones. It was a good thing we did: Later, we found five listening devices hidden in our rooms in the guesthouse. One staffer unscrewed a plate over the light switch in his room, discovered a bug, removed it, and took it home as a souvenir.

I have often wondered about a paradox in American government: Every four years, voters elect a president and in California a governor, the only officeholders elected by all the people; then, the same people in their individual districts turn around and elect a legislature and congress that is often controlled by the opposing party, enabling it to prevent the president or governor from carrying out the things they elected him or her to do.

The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget.

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, I was a New Dealer to the core. I thought government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn't trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn't enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.

For years, I've heard the question: "How could an actor be president?" I've sometimes wondered how you could be president and not be an actor.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.

The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.

No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.

The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.

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.

As I have often said, governments don't produce economic growth, people do.