Quotes About Reagan

Ronald Reagan offered us an international vision divided between the free world and the evil empire. Even if this was a cartoonish view, it helped us make sense of everything from Star Wars to industrial policy.

The FSG story starts to lose its fairy-tale aura when filthy lucre invades the sacred enclosure, as it did ubiquitously in the every-man-for-himself Reagan era.

I think we need one recognized, respected public figure to make a tough, blunt statement on just what Reagan's record is and what he might do to the country, let alone the Republican Party before Christmas.

The formulation of policy toward China, as with most issues confronting the Reagan administration, became a contest between conservative ideologues (let Reagan be Reagan) and pragmatic advisers struggling for control of the mind of a president who was rarely engaged intellectually.

The audience perked up the more. American conservatives were a combative tribe who didn't speak of liberals as their "friends," but here Reagan did. His tone was serious, but it wasn't angry, the way Goldwater's often was. Reagan criticized Democratic leaders, but he didn't criticize Democrats. He condemned the direction the American government was going, but he professed confidence in the American people.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

Governor Reagan delivered perhaps the most famous one-liner. A hippie, he said, is someone who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.

The next successful Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, deliberately chose a citadel of white supremacy -- the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi -- as the kickoff site for his presidential campaign, where he declared his support for states rights, code words signaling that the federal government should leave local jurisdictions to handle the race problem as they see fit.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Reagan cut through irrational federal regulations to allow children to live with their parents, where they could receive care that would cost the taxpayer one-sixth as much as institutional care. By contrast, Obamacare has added thousands of pages of bureaucratic regulations and will cost the federal government untold billions.

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.

Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.

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.

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.

I'm trying to uphold what was true about conservatism. I consider myself a Reagan conservative.

Ronald Reagan's era can be defined, number one in most people's minds, by the Cold War and by the end of it - and by the strong principles he stood for.

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.

Two famous happy warriors – Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

The author attributes part of the Carter-Reagan divide to their respective attitudes toward the city from which they governed. Carter was deeply suspicious of its coziness. Reagan intended to enjoy his temporary home even while delivering it from its reigning ideology.

For Reagan,for his contemporaries, and many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation's stepping back from necessary toughness

corporations have benefited from deregulation against marketing directly to children, which began in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan used to say that the nine scariest words in the English language were 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.