Quotes from Steven F. Hayward

The same government that brought you urban renewal is likely to make an even worse mess of suburban renewal.

Truly environmentalism has displaced economics as the dismal science.

Causes that live by politics, die by politics.

Reagan liked to quip about détente: "Détente—isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day?

One of the quips Reagan scribbled on a notepad after waking up after surgery was Winston Churchill's famous line from his autobiography My Early Life that "there is no more exhilarating feeling than being shot at without result.

George Will's equally serviceable formula was "He does not want to return to the past; he wants to return to the past's way of facing the future." Reagan's variety of future-oriented optimism rooted in historical attachment has become almost unrecognizable in the age of a postmodernism that is openly contemptuous of history and historical experience.

In all great business very large errors are excused or even unperceived, but in definite and local matters small mistakes are punished out of all proportion." This is one reason politicians are risk-averse, and why modern government administration seeks to minimize risk and avoid failure through a mindless bureaucratic process that delivers mostly mediocrity.

Democrats would back larger domestic spending cuts if Reagan would cut in half the third year of the income tax cut. "You can get me to crap a pineapple," Reagan replied, "but you can't get me to crap a cactus.

When asked if he knew about Pac-Man, Reagan quipped: "Someone told me it was a round thing that gobbles up money. I thought it was Tip O'Neill.

By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin—the "incandescent" Lenin, as Churchill called him—would have been appalled.

Soviet woman of child-bearing age had six to eight abortions. This translated into 10 million to 16 million abortions per year. (The comparable figures for the United States were 0.5 abortions per woman and roughly 1.5 million abortions per year.)

The Federal Communications Commission was preparing to grant the necessary authority to begin cellular telephone service, even though the technology had been around for more than twenty years. The first popular handheld cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, would appear in 1983; the size of a brick, the DynaTAC cost $3,995, and its battery charge lasted only thirty minutes.

Reagan called Allen two hours later when he was changing planes in Chicago, asking, "Who is he?" "Who is who?" Allen replied. "Who is this Jeane Kirkpatrick?" "Well, first, he's a she."71

Berns was vitally concerned about the philosophical ground of virtue in the individual, which was the necessary foundation of a decent regime. Jaffa was concerned with the philosophic ground of the regime, which he thought was the necessary foundation for individual virtue.

Kirkpatrick's appointment was said to be unpopular with some Reagan insiders such as the Kitchen Cabinet, who held against her that she was a Democrat and therefore not a Reagan loyalist.

Casey was most famous for his supposed lack of diction; his "mumbling" became so legendary in Washington that Reagan quipped that Casey was the only CIA director in history who didn't need to use a scrambler phone. On some minutes of National Security Council meetings, Casey's indecipherable comments were recorded as "??????.

Only one Republican voted against Reagan's tax cut—Vermont's Jim Jeffords

The important point to grasp is that Reagan approached politics from the standpoint of a citizen rather than as an aspiring politician or intellectual.

We're for limited government," he said in his 1988 State of the Union speech, "because we understand, as the Founding Fathers did, that it is the best way of ensuring personal liberty and empowering the individual so that every American of every race and region shares fully in the flowering of American prosperity and freedom.

It is only as Reagan became the oldest living ex-president and new testimonials from his doctors came to light about his extraordinary fitness that we have begun to perceive that Reagan was as physically unique as he was mentally unique. Reagan

Reagan had predicted since the early 1960s that a "prairie fire" of conservative populism would someday sweep the nation; on November 4 it appeared that Reagan had finally struck the match.

Reagan passed out prepublication copies of Mandate to his incoming cabinet secretaries and senior staff in December. Mandate for Leadership became a rare think tank product on the bestseller list in the Washington, D.C., area.

Fidel Castro's opinion about Reagan offered right before the election: "We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany." Libya's Kaddafi was not to be left out of the parade, saying, "Reagan is Hitler number 2!" (This is admittedly confusing, since most radical Arab leaders like Hitler.)

As with Three Mile Island, the hysteria of the media and the political class over the Deepwater spill is likely to lead to increased risk and adverse environmental tradeoffs.