Ronald Reagan Quotes

Wherever there is repression of the individual, wherever there are acts contrary to the nature of the individual, there can be no greater crime.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.

I've always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way, that some divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love for freedom and the courage to uproot themselves, leave homeland and friends, to come to a strange land. And coming here they created something new in all the history of mankind-a land where man is not beholden to government, government is beholden to man.

We Americans are free to give our opinions and make our voices heard. We work in a free enterprise economy that, for over 200 years, has lifted countless individuals above the circumstances of their birth to achieve their God-given potential. We have been an exceptional country because, here, people are free to practice their faiths and worship God.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

I think Americans is a very special nation that was created so that people could be free. And they could be free to believe what they wanted. They could be free to work as hard as they wanted, knowing that their labor would accrue to them and to their family, that there wouldn't be a lot of people impinging upon their freedom and telling them what they had to do, and that it would be a nation that was representative of the people, and that it would have a government that was representative of the people rather than one that tried to rule the people.

Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national

The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes - more important than gold or houses or lands - more important than art or science - more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.

Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.

The United States of America provides the freedom, I should say permits, allows, does not constrain the freedom that we're all born with that allows each of us to pursue whatever it is that we define as a quality of life. Access to quality-of-life services, access to quality-of-life products is unparalleled in the United States of America.

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Capitalism is the only economic system compatible with free individuals

The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom...

The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want.

I have come to one firm conviction after these many years of trying to figure out the plain truth of things. The best chance for achieving peace and prosperity, for the maximum number of people worldwide, is to pursue the cause of liberty. If you find this to be a worthwhile message, spread it throughout the land.

Being a conservative also used to involve the concept of people being free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Conservatives used to be very libertarian.

The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

I'm for freedom, which I believe is a universal value that every human being is and that is a gift from God.

We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.

The first thing I can remember I ever wanted was to go to the United States. And for reasons that are as conventional as you can imagine: I wanted to know if it was really true that it was the land of opportunity, of democracy, and individual liberty.

It seems from Pope Francis, immigrants, anybody who doesn't live here in America, has an automatic right to come here just because there's no other place like it on earth. And what is never discussed is how it got so special. How did it happen? Why is it so prosperous? Why is it so free?

America has been another name for opportunity.