Reagan Quotes

Star Wars represents a fundamental assault on the concepts, alliances and arms-control agreements that have buttressed American security for several decades, and the president’s continued adherence to it constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.

Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.

The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan's first term.

Yes, Ronald Reagan did sleep through cabinet meetings—and deservedly so. They were incredibly tedious. I know; I was there.

Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric.

This is a true story. The day after Reagan won, I was walking into the courthouse when someone said that they'd bet Reagan would appoint me U.S. attorney.

The worst mistake Ronald Reagan ever made was to accept George W. Bush as his running mate.

Everything is about looking for happiness and God. That was a sentiment shared by my dear friend Ronald Reagan.

Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" Reagan wondered. "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx.

You'll notice that Nancy Reagan never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.

Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for Ronald Reagan - not because he was the most religious candidate, but he possessed the quality evangelicals felt like was most important, and that is leadership.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

An old Russian woman goes into Kremlin, gets an audience with Mikhail Gorbachev and says, In America anyone can go to the White House, walk up to Reagan's desk and say, 'I don't like the way you are running the country.' Gorbachev replied, You can do the same thing in the Soviet Union. You can go into the Kremlin, walk up to my desk and say 'I don't like the way Reagan is running his country.'

Ronald Reagan is not a typical politician because he doesn't know how to lie, cheat, and steal. He's always had an agent for that.

President Reagan doesn't retain very much of what comes his way on a given day.

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.

I changed to Republican when Reagan became president because I wanted to see a change to years of Democrat-run Senate. And I voted Republican until Obama. I think he's terrific.

The fact that a TV star can become president should be old news since [Ronald] Reagan, and old news since the Nixon-Kennedy debates - which the famous story, whether or not you agree, is that if you listened on the radio, Nixon won; if you listened on TV, Kennedy won.

It has become commonplace to call Trump a reality TV star. That is said as an aspersion, the way Ronald Reagan was called an actor. But Reagan's acting experience, his ability to talk to the camera and not yell to the hall, is what helped make him such a good politician. It is the same with Trump.

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

The more the American people see the sharp differences between Mr. Reagan and me and the visions we have of our future, the better off the American people will be.

Having worked for him in the nuclear weapons policy business, I can tell you that President Reagan was committed to assuring the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent.

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.

Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.