Top 320 Reagan Quotes

I am clearly more popular than Reagan. I am in my third term. Where’s Reagan? Gone after two! Defeated by George Bush and Michael Dukakis no less.

I was on the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. That’s an experience I’ll never forget.

Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House. But even then, their control of the Republican Party was not a given.

I think the Reagan people are superb marketers. Their whole approach to polling, to television, to the symbolism and the rest approaches genius.

In the event of the death of a current or former President, like the recent death of President Ronald Reagan, the flag should be flown at half-staff for thirty days from the day of the death.

One of President Reagan’s first and wisest initiatives was to effectively shutdown the anti-trust division of the Justice Department.

I’m particularly happy that the Ronald Reagan Building is both public and private, and embraces his lifelong belief… in free and open trade.

All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I’m not so certain he was nice. It’s hard for me to think of anyone as ‘nice’ when I hear him say ‘The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.’

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.

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.

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.

I have very little respect for Nancy Reagan. There is something about her that is very petty.

Reagan was the conservative Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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.

Limbaugh can rightly be said to be the greatest populist expositor of conservatism in America since Reagan, and the link between the Reagan generation and the so-called Rush Babies.

I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.

I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.

Without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan there would probably still be a Soviet Union.

In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.

Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.

The villains will come along. There were plenty in the Carter administration, and there will be plenty with Reagan.

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.

It wasn’t like anybody said, ‘Oh, Ronald Reagan will have a landslide in 1980.’ In fact, you look back at the Dukakis numbers, the Perot numbers, there was always this presumption that the Republican was going to lose. Not just that the Democrat would win, but that the Republican was going to lose.

Mad or glad, Mr. Reagan is head over heels in love with Mrs. Reagan and can’t even imagine a world without her – He loves her.

We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.

Conservative statesmen from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan sometimes supported protectionism, and at other times, they leaned toward lowering barriers. But they always understood that trade policy was merely a tool for building a strong and independent country with a prosperous middle class.

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

I helped Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp develop supply-side economics.

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.

Often dismissed or underestimated by political opponents, President Reagan had the most valuable weapon in the political arsenal: a bond with the people.

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!

By supporting Reagan, evangelicals were not supporting womanizing or divorce, but they were endorsing Reagan’s policies.

Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.

Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity.

So I would say Reagan was the best, and certainly Clinton the worst.

While Democrats may never adopt the policies of Ronald Reagan, they should follow his golden rule of politics closely. Reagan adamantly instructed his party members to never publicly criticize another Republican.

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.

The words spoken by the leader of the free world can expand the frontiers of freedom or shrink them. When Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’, a surge of confidence rose that would ultimately breach the bounds of the evil empire.

Actually, my wine was served at the White House twice. Reagan must have been asleep when he ordered it.

As a candidate, Obama projected himself as a new Reagan, above narrow party politics. He wanted to please all but has ended up annoying many.

Ronald Reagan was the best Ronald Reagan ever, and Ronald Reagan was a cool guy. You’re not Ronald Reagan. You can’t run as him; you can’t relive his career. You can’t just have somebody else’s career. You have to be you.

I think Ronald Reagan was one of the great presidents, period, not just recently. I thought he had the demeanor. I thought he had the bearing. I thought he had the thought process.

Tonight, I want to say to every member of the democratic party, who believes in limited government, in personal opportunity and the united States constitution, and a safe and secure America, come home. To the Reagan Democrats, your party has left you. And the Republican party wants you, we welcome you back.

There’s a reason why, when Reagan became president, he started getting rid of regulations, and we had a booming economy.

Almost all first ladies have had tremendous power on personnel issues, whether the public realized it or not, whether it was Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan or whoever.

My feeling is that it’s a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.

I tell people all the time that I was born and raised in Ronald Reagan’s America.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was a Republican governor of California who went through a painful defeat in the 1976 presidential race before winning four years later.

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.

Again, President Reagan was sort of an amiable presence out at the ranch by the last 6 months of his presidency. He had no effect on national policy at all.

Always the eternal optimist, President Reagan instilled confidence and optimism at a time both were in short supply in our country.

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.

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.

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.

Unlike the Reagan and Bush Administrations, with but one exception, the Clinton administration failed to reach out to Republicans in creating a new team, and eventually paid a political price.

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.

My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.

Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.

I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town.

When most presidents get in, they move to the center because they realize that this is a centrist country – even Reagan.

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.

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.

The highlight of my career was being at the inaugural gala of Ronald Reagan, and I owe that to Mr. Sinatra.

Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it’s the heartland of America. It’s a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it’s beginning to pass.

Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president for his first term in 1980, he received strong support from the so-called Sagebrush Rebels. The Rebels wanted lands owned by the federal government to be transferred to state governments.

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.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

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.

For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

Walter Mondale was dissuaded from running for the Senate from Minnesota in 1990, in part out of fear that his 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 had reduced his standing.

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.

During the Reagan Administration, so much attention was devoted to fighting Marxism in Nicaragua and El Salvador that Washington lost sight of longer-term challenges in other countries.

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn’t leave the Republican Party; it left me.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He’s the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.

It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.

I could run for Congress. Why not? Good heavens, if Ronald Reagan can be president, I ought to make a great secretary of the treasury.

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.

Global political conditions make a direct American intervention difficult, but President Reagan’s messianic and visceral attitude toward the Nicaraguan revolution could mean it will happen as an act of desperation.

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.

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.

‘Crumbling’ Down’ is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president – he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

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.

When President Ronald Reagan negotiated some significant arms reduction deals with the then-Soviet Union, he was considered a real hero, someone who was advocating for peace.

In the course of his ongoing crusade for Medicaid expansion, Ohio governor John Kasich has suggested that Ronald Reagan, Saint Peter, and God Himself all would support his plan to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

We got two examples in recent history from this country. One in the ’80s under President Reagan. One under President Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the ’90s. We had nearly 5 percent growth rate in each of those decades. We can do it again for sure.

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.

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.

JFK and Reagan’s growth model included tax cuts and a steady dollar. Trump has taken a gigantic step toward restoring prosperity with his tax-cut-centered fiscal policy.

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.

Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.

As we begin this debate, I am confident that we will hear the supporters of this bill argue in the name of Ronald Reagan that this research is consistent with his long-held views about the sanctity of life.

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?

Most politicians – those people who live, eat and breathe politics – like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn’t do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.

My constituents feel betrayed by the promise that Reagan made, that if we grant amnesty, we’ll then secure the border. We obviously didn’t do that.

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.

Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime – may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.

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.

I watched Reagan turn around the country by lowering taxes and controlling spending, and I’m applying the same principles.

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.

As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.

PBS was not a left-wing ideology. I mean, Air America was, but PBS was not. But anybody who tells the truth is now branded and marginalized. The devolution of the American press began in 1986 when Ronald Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine.

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.

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?

In the ’80s, Ronald Reagan inspired me to become politicized, because I grew up in that era when everything I cared about was under attack.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

In my experience, I have learned that there is rarely the perfect man for the perfect job, but Reagan was born to play the role of president. He was an inspirational leader when the country really needed it.

President Reagan likes to say Uncle Sam is a kindly old man with a spine of steel, and that he is. But I want to see Uncle Sam as well with a mind and with a heart and with a soul and a conscience.

To his credit, Obama didn’t just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something – to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America’s deeply and historically individualist polity.

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

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.

You can’t have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.

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.

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.

Every time we’ve had a pro-growth fundamental tax reform, be it under President Reagan, President Kennedy – you can even go all the way back to President Coolidge – we have seen paychecks increase, economic growth be ignited, and, actually, more revenues come into the government.

I became a Republican, before I knew what a Republican even was, because of Ronald Reagan.

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.

Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we’re the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.

When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that’s when he crossed his final threshold.

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.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

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.

When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado’s a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.

President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

I want to see the next Reagan. I want somebody who brings out the good in Americans and challenges us to aspire to that North Star, someone who wants to empower our families and individuals and communities and let them be free to achieve their dreams. That’s what’s going to make this country again.

I still subscribe to the theory that Ronald Reagan once pronounced: that I will never speak ill will of my fellow Republican.

Ronald Reagan said, ‘Trust, but verify.’ President Obama is ‘trust, but vilify.’ He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.

Ronald Reagan was very successful.

I’m glad Reagan is president. Of course, I’m a professional comedian.

I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.

Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.

Under Reagan’s policies, inflation and nominal GNP growth shriveled much faster than predicted, throwing off government revenue estimates and resulting in budget deficits.

Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.

President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.

Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That’s television. President Reagan’s press conferences: That’s television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.

In 1980, a nation in need of change selected Ronald Reagan to restore the shine to a tarnished America.

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.

Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.

If the United States had maintained its spending under Ronald Reagan, it is possible that the attacks of 9/11 – presaged by Islamic terror attacks on multiple American targets beginning with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 – would have been stopped.

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.’

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.

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.

Reagan’s legacy is so powerful because he identified the state as the central issue in American politics.

As governor of California in 1970, Reagan endeared himself to millions of conservatives nationwide when he publicly rebuked the anti-war movement that was exploding on college campuses.

Ronald Reagan knew who he was. Barack Obama is still working through that equation politically.

At the same time, the Reagan Administration assured that the main elements of policymaking were in the hands of competent loyalists, thus assuring a successful launch and a highly successful first year.

Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.

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.

I’m a conservative. I was an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan; I thought he was fabulous.

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.’

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.

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.

The inaugural of Ronald Reagan, with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And that was the greatest thing. Ronald Reagan and George Bush. That was – I still remember like it was yesterday.

When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

President Obama’s farewell speech soared, towered, dragged. True, it was longer than Reagan’s, Clinton’s and GWB’s speeches combined. If it got any longer, it would have qualified as a third term.

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.

Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.

I think that Ronald Reagan had it right, being against abortion except in certain limited, defined circumstances.

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.

When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

Tax reform is the legislative challenge of a generation for America. It hasn’t been accomplished since 1986, when President Reagan and Congress delivered the most sweeping overhaul of our nation’s tax code in American history. 2017 is the year to change that and make history of our own.

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.

Donald Trump understands the anxiety and aspirations of the American people like no leader since Reagan.

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.

More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.

The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn’t imagine that.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn’t like to have enemies around him.

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.

Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were talking to people who go bowling on Thursday night, and they were understanding what we were saying.

Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected – and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?

Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on – that’s how much he revered the presidency.

My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.

I was always impressed by Betty Ford and what she went through and how full of integrity she was, and how brave. I think Mrs. Reagan was a role model of my mother’s generation, intelligent, very supportive of her husband. I am very different from my mom, but I admired her devotion.

Some of my Democratic friends don’t like it when I say that, but Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat and still a leader. He brought strong people around him, and he had a vision for where he wanted to take the country.

I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was… a large Arctic region covered with ice.

When I was operating as one of President Reagan’s economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government’s landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.

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.

President Reagan’s one-liners were terrific.

We didn’t exist. Ronald Reagan didn’t say the word ‘AIDS’ until 1987. I’ve tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men’s Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did.

The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.

My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.

President Obama has lowered taxes more than he has raised them, and they are today lower than they were in President Reagan’s time. But you don’t hear conservatives crowing about that.

Ronald Reagan came in – he was a leader. Some of my Democratic friends don’t like it when I say that. He had a vision where he wanted to take the country, and things started moving again.

My mom had grown up in the South. Louisiana and Georgia. She had been deeply religious. Baptist, then Mormon. She had worked for the U.S. military. She had voted for Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior.

I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous; he’s complicated.

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.

‘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.

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.

Reagan’s approach will achieve one of the basic goals of the conservative: Things remain basically the same. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, or even a little poorer.

I’m getting a little tired of everybody quoting Ronald Reagan.

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.

I had the pleasure of knowing Ronald Reagan before he became Governor of California. He was a truly great human being and we usually spent our time together reminiscing about mutual friends.

It was my sister Maureen who was responsible for my becoming a Reagan.

I can remember – I don’t want to identify the individual – but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.

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.

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.

Under Reagan came the idea of putting your pension plan in the stock market, which wasn’t a guaranteed pension.

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.

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

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.

President Reagan is now at rest. We mourn his passing, but we are grateful for the gifts he gave us: a safer world, strong economic base, and a renewed belief in America’s greatness.

I challenge anybody to say that I wouldn’t know how to approach foreign policy because, unlike some of the other people, I at least have a foreign policy philosophy, which is an extension of the Reagan philosophy. Peace through strength, and my philosophy is peace through strength and clarity.

We are a better Nation and the world is a safer place because of Ronald Reagan.

I was a Reagan backer. It was a shock for some people that I could agree with anything that man would say.

With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.

Reagan’s enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan’s value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

His track record of pragmatism, depth and candor all speak to a person who would find the Tea Party simplistic, opportunistic and misguided. Reagan was surrounded by some very smart people who gave him very sound advice. They were not wondering where certain countries are on the map.

In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children’s children.

The early favorite for the GOP nomination and ‘natural’ heir to Reagan was Vice President George H.W. Bush. But Bush was an imperfect fit for the party’s base.

I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan’s son. What a great honor.

Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.

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.

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.

I don’t think anybody is – no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time.

I’ll confess that, from an early age, I was a huge fan of President Reagan because my parents bought me an enormous stuffed monkey that they named President Reagan – yes, I get it now.

To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and ‘spin’ news to the president’s advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.

When Chelsea was 9 months old, I was defeated for reelection in the Reagan landslide. And I became overnight, I think, the youngest former governor in the history of the country. We only had two-year terms back then.

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

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president.

During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of ‘American exceptionalism’ is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.

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.

I stood respectfully as Ronald Reagan was sworn in to his second term though I disagreed with him on many issues. I stood as well for the inauguration of George W. Bush’s second term though I thought his war in Iraq was a tragic mistake.

With Ed Wood, it was this sort of blending of Ronald Reagan, the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ and Casey Kasem.

The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter’s very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn’t win a second term.

Jimmy Carter began his planning in the early summer of 1976, Ronald Reagan a year prior. The Clinton Administration, elected in 1992, lingered in naming its team, and as a result, took almost a year to staff its ranks.

There was a time when the Republican Party could discuss possible reforms to our gun laws: Ronald Reagan himself endorsed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994.

I was a graduate student in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan called for the construction of a new space station. I knew then that I wanted to apply for the astronaut program, and this was an exciting development.

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.

As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.

I believe in Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, thou shall not speak unfavorably of another Republican.

The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. That is particularly the case if you’re a U.S. presidential candidate and pundits are likening you to a conservative giant like Ronald Reagan.

I am involved with politics today because of the inspiration I received from Ronald Reagan.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can’t compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s free market enthusiasms.

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.

Reagan’s dead, and he was a lousy President.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan’s consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union – the only competing world empire at the time – was bound to collapse!

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.

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.

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.

I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, ‘I don’t know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.’

President Reagan preached ‘trickle down economics’ but naively did not reckon on the fact that the wealthy would only care about getting more for themselves instead of caring about helping those with less.

The Hollywood of Frank Capra’s era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.

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.

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.

Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I’ve met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

When I read Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, I think it’s a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it’s amazing. This is the time I lived in.

Reagan was no neocon.

Trump is not a conservative and has no conservative agenda. If elected president, he would not govern as the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

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.

Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.

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.

Everyone seemed to want a piece of Ronald Reagan. It was maddening.

The day before the anniversary of D-Day, we lost a man who was equaled by few and surpassed by none as a leader in the cause of freedom: Ronald Reagan.

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.

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.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

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.

It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.

If the GOP wants to know why it lost the Reagan Democrats, it is because the GOP exported their jobs to Mexico and China.

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.

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.

‘Eureka’ was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.

I tease sometimes and say that the King holiday is a 20th-century miracle. Reagan even signed it, and he was completely opposed to the idea.

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.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.

President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.

I actually have several busts of Ronald Reagan that have been presented to me.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

If you go back and look at President Reagan’s speeches, they bring you to tears almost.

I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.

President Reagan, Jack Kemp and other advocates of supply-side economics understood that pro-growth tax, spending and economic policies were essential to America’s long-term economic and fiscal health.

President Trump has rebuilt the American military to an extent we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan.

We’re seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.

Do you want to know what scares the Washington cartel? Actually, not remotely. I don’t scare them in the tiniest bit. What scares them is you. What scares them is that old Reagan coalition is coming back together, of conservatives.

So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore.

The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.

When Ronald Reagan’s administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning – yet defended the principle behind the scheme.

Well, I think the reality is that as you study – when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth. They expanded the economy. They expand tax revenues.

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.

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.

Whereas Jimmy Carter had aggressively pursued anti-merger activity – the imbecilic case against AT&T was prosecuted under President Carter – Mr. Reagan understood the virtue of allowing companies to exploit the synergies of mergers to gain efficiency and lower costs.

I still remember March 31, 1981, when a deeply disturbed John Hinckley Jr. took aim at President Ronald Reagan and fired shots that hospitalized the Commander-in-Chief and two others, and left his Press Secretary James Brady paralyzed for life.

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.

The Reagan years showed us that expanding economic freedom should be the North Star – the guiding light – of U.S. policy, because it is the best way to achieve sustained and broad-based prosperity for all.

Don’t worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains… who is the next Ronald Reagan?

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.

We’re going to lose Social Security and Medicare if Republicans and Democrats do not come together and find a solution like Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. I will be the Ronald Reagan if I can find a Tip O’Neill.

No politician was more maligned than Ronald Reagan.

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.

I have been hung in effigy by the gay community for a long time, from when I was on President Reagan’s first AIDS commission.

Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin’s bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

Where Reagan channeled disenchantment with overweening government, Obama symbolized America’s transformation into a multiracial country.

I am a Reagan Republican: I believe in Free Market Capitalism; I believe in economic growth.

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.

When Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush in 1980, it was a clear signal that he was running an inclusive campaign; that he welcomed the moderate and even liberal wings of the GOP – there was a liberal wing back then – into his campaign.

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.

Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He’s not the simple, folksy figure that he’s often portrayed as.

What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?

It’s time for a 21st-century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn’t 70 be the new 65? The last time Washington politicians tinkered ever so gingerly with the government-sanctioned retirement age, Ronald Reagan was in office and Generation X-ers were all in diapers.

Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.

I was a freshman in college in 1980, the year that Reagan was elected, and I went around badgering people to vote for him.

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn’t do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.

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!’

As chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, I continue to be inspired by President Reagan’s 1985 national address to the American people as he challenged them to join him in boldly reforming the broken, complex tax code.

I keep Reagan’s 11th Commandment that I don’t run down other Republicans.

Reagan’s emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people’s longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

Over the course of two terms, President Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the political atmosphere in a way still being felt today.

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.’

To my mind, a president should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.