Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Reagan Quotes from famous persons: Mac Thornberry, Dennis Hastert, Chris Christie, John Updike, Shannen Doherty. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Reagan Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions.
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Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
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As we celebrate President Reagan’s remarkable career and historic legacy, we also celebrate a man of strong character, deep conviction, unforgettable charm, and wonderful wit.
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He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don’t think he was a good president, but I’ll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.
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Ronald Reagan’s vision of smaller government, less taxes, and a strong national defense has led to a prosperous America. As president, he rebuilt our military and reinvigorated our confidence in ourselves.
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The values that I hold are consistent with the party of Lincoln, the party of Reagan, and the party of Trump, of the Republican Party, and so I’m honored to stand with the president.
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During Ronald Reagan’s administration, ’60 Minutes‘ ran a segment about the difference between Reagan’s rhetoric and Reagan’s actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan’s team called up ’60 Minutes’ to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.
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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.
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Like Reagan, President Trump strives for good relations with all nations, including Russia. But no nation, including Russia, should doubt the president’s commitment to defending the United States and our allies.
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Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
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The Republican Party is either going to return to the party of fiscal responsibility and consistent conservative principles as it was under Ronald Reagan, or it will continue down the path of ‘sporadic moderation.’
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The Spending Control Act. It would recreate President Reagan’s grace commission to have a bipartisan commission on how we reduce spending.
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Make America Great Again was a political slogan. It was used before, I believe Ronald Reagan used it before. It was about making America great and rallying America. Unfortunately, I would say 10 percent of the population that voted for President Trump has a different view. They have embraced it as ‘Make America White Again.’
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The first term of the Clinton administration was very jolly. Everybody was running around meeting people and of course, in the second term, everyone went down the black hole, which also happened at the end of the Reagan administration.
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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.
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Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.
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Reagan used to say that ‘we’re a country with a government.’ Well, now we’re a government with a country, and we’re making everybody else that way, too.
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During his runs for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney has done a good job of mimicking Reagan’s anti-government diatribes and ‘better days ahead’ rhetoric.
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Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all used temporarily targeted tariffs on specific industries.
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Mr. Gingrich has a number of elements in his record that could be criticized accurately. But to suggest that he was somehow anti-Reagan or to suggest that Reagan was anti-Gingrich is preposterously untrue.
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If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.
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So I would say Reagan was the best, and certainly Clinton the worst.
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At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It’s always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office.
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Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
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I was a Reagan backer. It was a shock for some people that I could agree with anything that man would say.
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What unites Sanders, McCarthy, McGovern and Reagan is the unmistakable clarity of their moral convictions, their tendency to outrage, and their insistence that the United States needs to embark on a whole new path.
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When you tax capital gains income, you don’t help the economy, you hurt the economy, which is why President Kennedy, President Reagan, President Clinton and President Bush all believed we should have a lower rate for capital gains.
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It’s time for conservative Americans to do what Reagan did.
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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.
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I believe in Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, thou shall not speak unfavorably of another Republican.
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The American Revolution was sparked by a series of taxes and tariffs on tea. More recently, the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions‘ were rooted in overturning the status quo – excessive taxation – to empower the individual and encourage a free society and prosperous economy.
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One of President Reagan’s first and wisest initiatives was to effectively shutdown the anti-trust division of the Justice Department.
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President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.
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The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
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Presidents Reagan and the first George Bush never used the vile language of some Trump supporters, but both blamed scarce resources and decaying communities on ‘welfare queens‘ and black criminals like Willie Horton.
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If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there’s a long friendship between the United States and Egypt.
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There’s a reason why, when Reagan became president, he started getting rid of regulations, and we had a booming economy.
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The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
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I am a Reagan Republican.
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Reagan was the most important American political figure of the latter half of the 20th century. No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley.
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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.
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I’m particularly happy that the Ronald Reagan Building is both public and private, and embraces his lifelong belief… in free and open trade.
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President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.
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We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.
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After 25 quarters of so-called recovery under Obama, it has increased a total of only 14.3 percent. Compare this to earlier periods. After the JFK tax cuts of the early 1960s, the economy grew in total by roughly 40 percent. After the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, the economy grew by a total of 34 percent.
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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!
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Those who remember Washington’s cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan’s intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva – alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! – with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.
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We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.
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I was part of that group of kids growing up in the ’80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call ‘living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,’ where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.
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Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child’s life – the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you’ll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
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The ur-conservatives of the 1950s – William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest – were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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To my mind, a president should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.
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Ronald Reagan was very successful.
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Does anybody remember, back in the depths of the recession of 1981-82, how President Reagan kept his chin up and exhorted American businesses to work hard and produce an economic recovery?
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We need independents, we need the GOP, we need Reagan Democrats.
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Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
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You know my father as governor, as president, but I knew him as dad. I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan’s son.
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Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition – the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War.
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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.
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Ronald Reagan was the Governor of California. He had earned the right to be considered for President of the United States. You learn a lot about a person by the way they have served. None of this applies to Trump. There’s no disclosure with him. I just think the man is a very troubled, emotional mess.
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I became a huge Reagan admirer.
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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.
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Reagan did not have to rely on or cope with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, or any of the other trolls that now dominate conservative politics.
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The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the ‘neocon’ description instead of calling themselves ‘The Real New Deal Democrats’ forever.
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Since Ronald Reagan we have had this assumption in the United States that the Republicans are the party of the military, the Republicans are the party of patriotism, the Republicans are the party of American values.
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I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock.
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If we have George W. Bush as president, we’re going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.
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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.
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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.
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Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not – and more often than liberals – about most of the important issues of the day.
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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.
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Whether one admired or was repulsed by the positions he took on matters foreign and domestic, it is undeniable that Reagan’s ability to project anger was highly attractive to his most passionate supporters on the far right – and crucial to his political success.
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I remember the ’80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.
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All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.
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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.
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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!’
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Reagan’s dead, and he was a lousy President.
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If ‘Mystery Train’ is my Nixon book and ‘Lipstick Traces‘ my Reagan book, ‘Invisible Republic‘ is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he’d done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.
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In Ronald Reagan’s chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.
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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.
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First, President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me, and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.
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Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.
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The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan’s first term.
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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.
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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.
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I’m a Ronald Reagan conservative, I’m an economic conservative, I’m strong military. But I also voice and speak and work hard on the social issues.
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The Reagan Administration, generally regarded as having conducted the most successful Transition of modern times, had managed during the election campaign to build bridges to the Democrats in some areas, notably foreign and national security policy.
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‘Family Ties,’ to me, was strictly ’80s. It was from the beginning of the ’80s until the end of the ’80s, and it was very specific to that time. Ronald Reagan was president.
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I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.
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I’m a Reagan Republican, which means I don’t speak ill of other Republicans.
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I’m glad Reagan is president. Of course, I’m a professional comedian.
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I hope in the end that people will remember what Reagan said: that if he could get 80 percent of what he wanted, you call it a win and move on.
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Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.
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I registered as a Republican when I turned 18 because of Ronald Reagan – he was the president at the time; I admired what he stood for. I respected him.
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Prediction is a mug’s game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.
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Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on ‘Laugh In’ in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
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Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, ‘The hell with that. I’m out there.’
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We are a better Nation and the world is a safer place because of Ronald Reagan.
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A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a ‘Dear Murph’ letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan’s father in a film.
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My record shows that I have put my country first, and I follow the philosophy and traditions of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
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If I could go, I would tell the truth to the North American people. President Reagan personally ordered my visa to be denied.
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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.
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When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened ‘the Reagan.’
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Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.
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In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.
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It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.
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I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town.
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Spine transplants are what we really need to take Reagan on.
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Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.
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Reagan was the conservative Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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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.
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While only about half of the voters feel they know very much about Reagan or what he stands for, the Republicans who do have a very positive perception of him.
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I think the best president – because he changed the whole mood of the country, the whole economy of the country, and stood up to Communism… that was continuing its causes around the world, and backed them off and caused them to collapse – and that was Ronald Reagan.
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The world is undoubtedly a safer, freer place because Thatcher – like Reagan – refused to back down when it came to defending freedom.
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I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous; he’s complicated.
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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.
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The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
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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.
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I’m getting a little tired of everybody quoting Ronald Reagan.
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Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.
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When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.
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Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.
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I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.
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Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don’t want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don’t, but they should.
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It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.
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Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.
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Under Reagan came the idea of putting your pension plan in the stock market, which wasn’t a guaranteed pension.
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Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.
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Throughout his life, Ronald Reagan believed America is capable of great things and its people could and would lead the way if left unburdened by taxation and regulation.
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President Reagan’s one-liners were terrific.
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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.
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We all obviously need others to look up to, and be inspirational to us. Ford did a great job as far as putting the presidency back where it belonged, getting the trust back after Nixon. And President Reagan has been one of the most influential presidents.
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Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma – a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor – but it wasn’t the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren’t running.
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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.
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And so it was interesting for me to find myself very enamored of a Republican president, but Ronald Reagan was someone I thought captured the spirit of America.
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I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
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We all should be concerned if our kids don’t know who Sandra Day O’Connor, John Adams, and Ronald Reagan are.
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My feeling is that it’s a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.
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Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I’m truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can’t really put my finger on any huge impact she’s had.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years – and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.
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Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had tremendous influence on generations of American because, even if people disagreed with them, they admired them because they made very strong commitments to things they believed in.
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When I say that Latinos share conservative values, when Ronald Reagan said that, we mean the love of family, the love of country, a commitment to personal responsibility, to hard work.
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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.
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The highlight of my career was being at the inaugural gala of Ronald Reagan, and I owe that to Mr. Sinatra.
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It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers‘ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers‘ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
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I would consider myself a Reagan Republican.
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So that was Reagan’s political problem. As a rancher in California, he was an environmentalist himself. But the President of the United States doesn’t control everything that happens in Washington.
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I often quote Ronald Reagan, who is pretty close to my favorite President ever, I will have to say that, but one of my favorite remarks he ever made was that when you look at Federal programs, there is nothing so close to eternal life on Earth as a Federal Government program.
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I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan’s son. What a great honor.
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Ronald Reagan became, you know, not only a Republican but a pretty conservative Republican – 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.
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Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.
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I think we need a very, very serious effort, primarily through tax policy to provide incentives and encouragement for people to save and invest and expand their businesses and to create more jobs. The kind of thing we did in the early Reagan years, 30 years ago. I think that’s essential.
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I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren’t really public servants.
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It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’
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I’ve had some wonderful times at the White House. I’ve been with Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush.
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I was involved in the ‘reformicon’ effort in 2013-2014, which was explicitly, ‘We can’t just Xerox Reagan.’ In the spirit of Reagan, actually, we could rethink things – maybe we need to think more about job-training programs, earned income tax credit, adjust the tax code.
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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.
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Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill – Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism – a much darker view, I think, of the world.
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With Ronald Reagan in the White House, somebody had to look out for those who were not so fortunate. That’s where I came in.
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I grew up admiring Ronald Reagan and Vice President Bush, and if I were old enough, I would have voted for 41. I was glad he won.
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Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
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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.
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Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
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Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call ‘a liturgy of absolution.’ He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn’t want that?
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As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary.
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Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.
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As a seven-year-old, I had definite opinions on Ronald Reagan.
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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.’
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Over the course of two terms, President Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the political atmosphere in a way still being felt today.
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To his lasting credit, President Reagan never wavered. He recognized the strategic importance of staying the course, both in terms of denying Moscow the military hegemony it sought in Western Europe and of restoring the will, cohesiveness, and security of the NATO alliance, so badly frayed during the turbulent 1970s.
308
My wife, Dixie, is evangelical Christian. We met in the Reagan White House, when she was a student intern. We’re members of the Horizon Christian Fellowship Church.
309
Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each suffered through his second four years. FDR was checkmated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Ike was dogged by Sputnik and reckless charges that the United States suffered from a Missile Gap. Reagan had to wend his way through Iran-Contra.
310
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose ‘family values‘ agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
311
Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.
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Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.
314
Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.
315
Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.
316
Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn’t looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.
317
Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America’s new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.
318
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Presidents at the end of their second term – Reagan with the Iran-contra affair, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky – often find they are bedevilled by hostile Congressional investigations.
320
Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president.
321
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.
322
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev’s broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.
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