18 Ronald Reagan Quotes on Policy

Ronald Reagan quotes on policy

3. Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.

18. I am an environmentalist. ... I am for clean air. ... I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country. Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent - 93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen.

27. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer - not an easy answer - but simple.

30. Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this [surrender], but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face - that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand - the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for 'peace at any price' or 'better Red than dead,' or as one commentator put it, he would rather 'live on his knees than die on his feet.' And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin - just in the face of this enemy?

51. History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

52. I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

61. It is time for us to realize that we're too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We're not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look.

63. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

72. As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the 'quality of life' ethic. I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future.

73. As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.

77. As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers.

80. I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

86. Too much SALT isn't good for you.

92. Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, 'What do you suppose the old fox meant by that?'

115. Liberals fought poverty and poverty won.

116. Any great nation that goes off the gold standard ends being a great nation.

120. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'

122. Trust, but Verify.