Reagan Quotations

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

Ronald Reagan was long thought to be the most conservative of Republicans. And by any standard today he is the most popular Republican in modern history. Yet he raised taxes 11 times, supported a ban on assault rifles and the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks, and established amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers.

Maybe we like our politicians to appear like bumbling oafs. It certainly never did Ronald Reagan or George Bush any harm. The Italians still seem enamoured of Silvio Berlusconi - a man whose entry into a room is less likely to be greeted with the Italian national anthem than by the Benny Hill theme tune.

Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama's boy and he said no, more of a papa's boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.

The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.

His track record of pragmatism, depth and candor all speak to a person who would find the Tea Party simplistic, opportunistic and misguided. Reagan was surrounded by some very smart people who gave him very sound advice. They were not wondering where certain countries are on the map.

If I could go, I would tell the truth to the North American people. President Reagan personally ordered my visa to be denied.

Reagan never cottoned to dictators. He was pure in this notion in a true belief that democracy was the best solution in the world because it spoke to people's hopes and dreams and aspirations, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.

When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado's a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.

After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.

I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn't become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City.

I'm glad Reagan is president. Of course, I'm a professional comedian.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.

I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan's son. What a great honor.

Regardless of your political affiliation, most people agree that Ronald Reagan was an American icon. He was a president of national significance and for that reason he deserves an honor in the nation's capital.

He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

I wanted to be a senator from Illinois. I was obsessed with politics. My dad was friends with a lot of local politicians, so I would hang out with them on Election Day and hand out buttons. Somehow, even though they were opposite, I loved Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. I thought they were the coolest guys!

I think that Obama is very cool. And I think he's clever, and I think he can be witty. But I don't think he's funny in either the way that Reagan was funny - or John McCain and Dick Cheney are both funny in that ruthless, kind of mean way.

In the Reagan administration, a great speech was just the first step in a long process. In the Obama administration, it's the only step.

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

At the same time, the Reagan Administration assured that the main elements of policymaking were in the hands of competent loyalists, thus assuring a successful launch and a highly successful first year.

President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.

Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.

Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.

The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.

Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.

I've been to Reagan National Airport. I tell people it was named after me.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.

Ronald Reagan said, 'Trust, but verify.' President Obama is 'trust, but vilify.' He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.

One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else.

Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on - that's how much he revered the presidency.

Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.

Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime - may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.

The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.

I still remember March 31, 1981, when a deeply disturbed John Hinckley Jr. took aim at President Ronald Reagan and fired shots that hospitalized the Commander-in-Chief and two others, and left his Press Secretary James Brady paralyzed for life.

All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I'm not so certain he was nice. It's hard for me to think of anyone as 'nice' when I hear him say 'The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.'

I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America's economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn't be accomplished without laying the groundwork.

President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution. Then he raised taxes and in '92 ran as an establishment moderate - same candidate, two very different campaigns.

Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.

You know, I left the country when Reagan got in; I went to France.

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state.

'Eureka' was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn't be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.

A troubled economy is always the sitting president's fault. It was when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, and when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by running against George W. Bush.

So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.

To my mind, a president should care about all people, and he didn't, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.

When President Ronald Reagan asked me a stupid question once, I called him an idiot in public! I thought I was going to be arrested, but he laughed and appreciated me.

Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

Limbaugh can rightly be said to be the greatest populist expositor of conservatism in America since Reagan, and the link between the Reagan generation and the so-called Rush Babies.

Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'

Ronald Reagan became, you know, not only a Republican but a pretty conservative Repub - not the most. But a pretty conservative Republican. And he's somebody that I actually knew and liked. And he liked me. And I worked with him and helped him.

Do you want to know what scares the Washington cartel? Actually, not remotely. I don't scare them in the tiniest bit. What scares them is you. What scares them is that old Reagan coalition is coming back together, of conservatives.

Tonight, I want to say to every member of the democratic party, who believes in limited government, in personal opportunity and the united States constitution, and a safe and secure America, come home. To the Reagan Democrats, your party has left you. And the Republican party wants you, we welcome you back.

During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.

While many of us never knew Ronald Reagan personally, we felt close to him because we shared his lighthearted sense of humor, admired his uncommon virtue, and were moved by his remarkable wisdom.

What's interesting is you could have showed me an article about 20 years ago in The Washington Post that predicted that Ronald Reagan was a lame duck.

We're going to lose Social Security and Medicare if Republicans and Democrats do not come together and find a solution like Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. I will be the Ronald Reagan if I can find a Tip O'Neill.

We're seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.

The Reagan memorabilia runs the gamut of his life, everything from an original bumper sticker from the 1980 election to magazine covers and T-shirts. It just shows that Reagan had many admirers.

The Reagan legacy is very vulnerable because George W. Bush has embraced it so wholeheartedly. Bush is the model, not the father, of the legacy. So much of the Reagan legacy is dependent on the Bush legacy.

We use Ronald Reagan to tell a decent amount of the story in his own words. We wanted to use as much of Ronald Reagan's words to show who Ronald Reagan was, not have people put words in his mouth.

Some of my Democratic friends don't like it when I say that, but Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat and still a leader. He brought strong people around him, and he had a vision for where he wanted to take the country.

Mike Reagan was an adopted child adopted by Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan. Here, at Centers, we do adoption support. And Mike Reagan aligns well with our mission.

Mrs. Reagan remains at his side and is actively participating in his physical therapy sessions. She is encouraged by his progress, but has been advised by the doctors to remain cautious in her optimism.

Mrs. Reagan has not endorsed any candidate in the campaign. Neither she nor President Reagan ever endorsed a candidate in a primary.

Mr. Reagan will raise taxes; and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

Moreover when Reagan and the President were compared on the handling of a series of issues of foreign affairs and dealing with Congress.

Richard Nixon went to China, and Ronald Reagan sat down with the Russians. Today President Bush has the same kind of opportunity to change his course. But it will take more than just a speech to do it.

I would remind you that in 1984, after the Mondale -- second Mondale-Reagan debate -- where Reagan clearly won, the instant polls showed that Mondale was the winner.

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.

Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.

When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.

To close Reagan down to general aviation sends the wrong signal.

His record, both on the bench and as an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, showed that he is an ideologue who would put our fundamental rights at risk.

His voice is his great weapon. It is not an orator's voice. It is husky, and sometimes it fades to a whisper. Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily intimate. Mr Reagan does not speak to audiences; he speaks to individuals.

Under Ronald Reagan - who cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent - black income, business development and business growth exploded.

He was fun to be around. Reagan would light up when he came into the room.

He justbrought the party together. All I had to do as party chairman was say,'Remember what Ronald Reagan would say on this issue,' and it was done.

He just brought the party together. All I had to do as party chairman was say, 'Remember what Ronald Reagan would say on this issue,' and it was done.

I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.

Last I heard, about 12 flights had landed at Reagan National since the restriction was lifted.

I think it's pretty obvious the model for victory is the Ronald Reagan model,

I think the 25th Amendment should have been invoked, ... There was a period of 10 to 15 hours where Ronald Reagan could not have responded to a crisis. He was out of communication. He was under anesthesia for three hours, then he was in the recovery room.

I was always impressed by Betty Ford and what she went through and how full of integrity she was, and how brave. I think Mrs. Reagan was a role model of my mother's generation, intelligent, very supportive of her husband. I am very different from my mom, but I admired her devotion.

It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true. It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives.

It is an honor and a pleasure for me to help welcome Spirit of Ronald Reagan to its new home at March Air Reserve Base, in the heart of my husband's beloved California.

It is a matter of enormous pride to see two of our colleagues become Supreme Court justices. The Reagan administration was very deliberate in trying to promote bright, ambitious young conservatives. And this is in many respects the fulfillment of that effort.

I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town.

President Bush, up until last year, retained strong Republican support and was viewed as the ideological heir to Ronald Reagan. Since last summer, that support has steadily eroded ... Indeed many Republicans appear to be looking beyond the Bush administration and do not identify themselves as Bush Republicans but rather as Reagan Republicans.

President Bush maintains an approval on the economy in the mid-forties -- exactly what Clinton had at the end of 1995 and above what Reagan had in 1983.

Suddenly, a blockage that had existed for at least 50 years was removed. What the Reagan administration was able to do was recover the original understanding of the religion clauses. Neutrality toward religion does not mean secularity. It means evenhandedness.

Log Cabin's accounting shell game will not cover up Grover's act of utter betrayal of the Reagan coalition of social and fiscal conservatives.