President Reagan Quotes

#1. I just have that sense this is the reason we got Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court in the first place is because Ronald Reagan was running for President.

Patricia Ireland

#2. Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did not feel his presence beside me-only his absence."

Edwin Morris

#3. I do not espouse the unitarian position. President Clinton's assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan's assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions.

Elena Kagan

#4. As [House] speaker, I came back, working with President Bill Clinton. We passed a very Reagan-like program: less regulation, lower taxes. Unemployment dropped to 4.2 percent. We created 11 million jobs.

Newt Gingrich

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

Samantha Power

#6. August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

Irin Carmon

#7. Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

Ronald Reagan

#8. How can a president not be an actor?

Ronald Reagan

#9. Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

Eugene Jarecki

#10. You know, when President Reagan, who was one of my idols, granted amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants it was based on the fact that the borders would be secured. That didn't happen. It didn't happen during the Bush administration.

Jan Brewer

#11. 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.

Peggy Noonan

#12. 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.

Robert Scheer

#13. How could an actor become president?

Ronald Reagan

#14. 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.

Charles B. Rangel

#15. 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.

Henry Bonilla

#16. Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.

James David Barber

#17. I've been truly blessed. I've been a fly on the wall of history. I've been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.

Arthur Laffer

#18. It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

John F. Kerry

#19. 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.

Frank Gaffney

#20. 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.

Steve Hanke

#21. When people tell me that I became President on January 20th, 1981, I feel I have to correct them. You don't become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.

Ronald Reagan

#22. If President Reagan could be an actor and become president, maybe I could become an actor. I've got a good pension. I can work for cheap.

William J. Clinton

#23. John Kerry suspended his campaign for five days this week in honor of President Reagan. And right now, he's ahead in the polls. How's that make him feel? Disappears for a week and he's up in the polls. What else can he do now but go into hiding.

Jay Leno

#24. 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.'

Warren Beatty

#25. 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.

Mike Pence

#26. I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated.

Nancy Reagan

#27. Mr. President: We, women political prisoners of the Soviet Union, congratulate you on your reelection to the spot of President of the USA. We look with hope to your country which is on the road of FREEDOM and respect for HUMAN RIGHTS. We wish you success on this road.

Ronald Reagan

#28. Throughout Ronnie's presidency, there was an ongoing public discussion as to how much influence the first lady should have on the president. It's hardly a new problem. As long as mankind has lived in groups, there's always been a question of how to handle the boss's wife.

Nancy Reagan

#29. 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.

Monica Crowley

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

Monica Crowley

#31. 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.

Elton Gallegly

#32. 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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#33. Some months before I declared, I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico. I did not go with a plan. I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas - how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence.

Ronald Reagan

#34. Reagan was president and had Democrats control the House and Senate, and they reformed the tax code. Clinton was president, and he had Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole; they reformed welfare and balanced the budget.

Kevin McCarthy

#35. The Congress of the United States, in recognition of the unique contribution of the Bible in shaping the history and character of this Nation, and so many of its citizens, has by Senate Joint Resolution 165 authorized and requested the President to designate the year 1983 as the 'Year of the Bible.'

Ronald Reagan

#36. 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.

Steve Garvey

#37. Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

Ronald Reagan

#38. 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.

Eric Alterman

#39. Remember when Ronald Reagan was president? We had Bob Hope. We had Johnny Cash. Think about where we are today. We have got President Obama. But we have no hope and we have no cash.

John Boehner

#40. 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.

Jim Ramstad

#41. 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.

Laurie Garrett

#42. 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.

Michael K. Simpson

#43. Expanding a failing, big-government program that reduces flexibility for the states and traps generations of Americans in dependency is not consistent with the kind of conservative solutions that Reagan sought during his terms as governor of California and president of the United States.

Edwin Meese

#44. President Reagan achieved such successes because when you sat in a room with him, there could be over 1,000 people in the room, yet you felt like there was only the two of you, and his wonderful wit would put you at ease. That was a tremendous gift.

Elton Gallegly

#45. 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.

Elliott Abrams

#46. Politicians used AIDS to energize anti-gay supporters and religious conservatives who heralded it as a consequence of immorality. Pat Buchanan, an adviser to President Reagan, declared, "The poor homosexuals - they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." A

Sean Strub

#47. [Ronald]Reagan and[George W.] Bush were far more radical than other presidents.

Kevin Drum

#48. They asked me to go in front of the Reagans. I'm not used to going in front of President Reagan, so we went out behind the Bushes.

Dan Quayle

#49. 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.

Rob Portman

#50. President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.

Ralph Nader

#51. As prime minister, I worked closely with Ronald Reagan for eight of the most important years of all our lives. We talked regularly both before and after his presidency. And I have had time and cause to reflect on what made him a great president.

Margaret Thatcher

#52. 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.

Sandra Dee

#53. 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.

Tomas Borge

#54. From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

Jon Meacham

#55. Presidents don't get vacations - they just get a change of scenery. The job goes with you.

Nancy Reagan

#56. AUGUST 5, 1981. That's the date it became official. It's rare that we can point to an exact date when a business theory or idea becomes an accepted practice. But in the case of mass layoffs, we can. August 5, 1981, was the day President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers.

Simon Sinek

#57. 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.

Bikram Choudhury

#58. 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.

Dan Jenkins

#59. 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.

Russell Baker

#60. I'm glad Reagan is president. Of course, I'm a professional comedian.

Will Durst

#61. 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.

Nigel Hamilton

#62. Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.

Jesse Jackson

#63. President Reagan fueled the spirit of America. His smile, his optimism, his total belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy and freedom, and his willingness to act on that belief, helped end the Cold War and usher in a new and brighter phase of history.

Colin Powell

#64. Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

Ralph Nader

#65. Did you see where President Reagan finally got a hearing aid? People have been telling him to get one for years, but he couldn't hear them.

Bob Hope

#66. It is absolutely right that President Reagan considers SDI and thank goodness people considered nuclear research before the last war.

Margaret Thatcher

#67. People don't understand that all presidents, the minute they become president, get a knock at the door. And there's a man there saying, 'Let's talk about your funeral.' At the time I thought, God, that's a terrible thing. Later on, I thought it was pretty wise.

Nancy Reagan

#68. Reagan, people claimed, was too old to run for president and to be elected. But he proved himself such a vigorous campaigner in the primary system that he overcame those beliefs.

Geoffrey Cowan

#69. Reagan's dead, and he was a lousy President.

Keith Olbermann

#70. President Reagan was concerned - deeply concerned, emotionally concerned - with the loss of life of any American, but especially with the lives of military soldiers, Marines, navy.

Robert McFarlane

#71. 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.

Nigel Hamilton

#72. President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.

Oliver North

#73. 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.

Noam Chomsky

#74. You could tell he (President Ronald Reagan) was an old radio guy. He never once looked at the television monitor.

Harry Caray

#75. President Reagan stood for conservative principles in a way that brought people together.

Ted Cruz

#76. I would rank George Washington as America's greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world's greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.

Ann Coulter

#77. There's the Ronald Reagan cupped-ear gambit. The press is deliberately and systematically kept away from him. All you hear is a bunch of monkeys screaming at him when they could easily have been brought right up and the president could have stood and talked in a conversational tone.

John Chancellor

#78. I honestly believe that if I decided to be the president of the United States, I could do it. That might sound foolish to some. But in my mind, if Ronald Reagan can become president, why not Will Smith?

Will Smith

#79. We campaigned across the South ... without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got north to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan, and then Mrs. Ferraro ... Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history.

Jesse Jackson

#80. 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.

Rick Perlstein

#81. The odds against an adoptee ending up as the child of the President of the United States are staggering. But then, so are the odds against a movie star becoming president.

Michael Reagan

#82. Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.

George Will

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

Mike Huckabee

#84. President [Ronald] Reagan told me he would negotiate and negotiate and negotiate with the Soviets, and I believed him.

Helmut Schmidt

#85. 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.

Ted Cruz

#86. 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.

Pat Boone

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

Helen Thomas

#88. 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.

Charles Krauthammer

#89. Just because you're married [to the president] doesn't mean you've given up your right to have and opinion.

Nancy Reagan

#90. There have been many amazing Presidents in American history, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, all of whom I greatly admire.

Donald Trump

#91. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president.

James Garner

#92. I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.

Ronald Reagan

#93. As a former U.S. attorney general under President Reagan, and a former Ohio secretary of state, we would like to say something that might strike some as obvious: Those who oppose photo voter-ID laws and other election-integrity reforms are intent on making it easier to commit vote fraud.

Edwin Meese

#94. 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.

Ed Gillespie

#95. 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.

Paul Begala

#96. 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.

Brian Sandoval

#97. In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters." These people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam.

Edward Said

#98. Ronald Reagan was a president of strength. His philosophy was a philosophy of strength - a strong military, a strong economy and strong families.

Mitt Romney

#99. 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.

Ann Coulter

#100. A Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago.

Peter Diamandis