Top 100 President Reagan Quotes
#1. 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
#2. President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.
Samantha Power
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.
Monica Crowley
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. It is absolutely right that President Reagan considers SDI and thank goodness people considered nuclear research before the last war.
Margaret Thatcher
#23. 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
#24. President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.
Oliver North
#25. President Reagan stood for conservative principles in a way that brought people together.
Ted Cruz
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. A Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago.
Peter Diamandis
#32. I don't think President Obama has been that revolutionary in reaching out to ethnic communities. President Reagan did a lot for the black community that people don't realize.
Terrence Howard
#33. For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the AIDS word.
John Irving
#35. Impeach President Reagan retroactively for agreeing with Obama on the assault weapons ban.
John Fugelsang
#36. Often dismissed or underestimated by political opponents, President Reagan had the most valuable weapon in the political arsenal: a bond with the people.
William L. Jenkins
#37. First, President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me, and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.
Brian Mulroney
#38. 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.
Eric Alterman
#39. What do I "think" of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don't think of him. And the more I see, the less I think.
Ayn Rand
#40. 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.'
Helen Thomas
#41. As we celebrate President Reagan's remarkable career and historic legacy, we also celebrate a man of strong character, deep conviction, unforgettable charm, and wonderful wit.
Jim Ramstad
#42. The Spending Control Act. It would recreate President Reagan's grace commission to have a bipartisan commission on how we reduce spending.
Mark Kirk
#43. Over the course of two terms, President Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the political atmosphere in a way still being felt today.
William L. Jenkins
#44. If you go back and look at President Reagan's speeches, they bring you to tears almost.
Lawrence Bender
#45. The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.
Christine Pelosi
#46. Well, it is alarming to have a president [Reagan] who doesn't know what he is doing.
McGeorge Bundy
#47. 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.
Richard DeVos
#48. If I could go, I would tell the truth to the North American people. President Reagan personally ordered my visa to be denied.
Tomas Borge
#49. President Reagan is a lot like E.T. He's cute, he's lovable, and he knows nothing about how Americans live.
Elayne Boosler
#50. To be sure, President Clinton reached an accord called "The Agreement" in 1994 that purports to address some of President Reagan's concerns.
Frank Gaffney
#51. Before consulting the hotheads who present various military options such as a military invasion: remember, President Reagan, Rambo only exists in the movies.
Daniel Ortega
#52. President Reagan always gave the credit to the American people and American ideals. He treated his job as a valuable temporary loan from the American people, a loan that should be respected and returned with dutiful appreciation.
William L. Jenkins
#53. 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.
Bob Beauprez
#54. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.
Philip Roth
#55. President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions.
Dennis Hastert
#56. President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln's phrase, referred to America as 'the last, best hope of man on Earth.' But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.
Edwin Meese
#57. Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.
Art Buchwald
#58. Always the eternal optimist, President Reagan instilled confidence and optimism at a time both were in short supply in our country.
Jim Ramstad
#59. President Reagan rushed home from Santa Barbara vacation, from the Reagan ranch when the Korean jetliner was shot out of the air by the Russians.
Kate Obenshain
#60. [Television executives] are afraid to advertise condoms that could save lives, but do not blush about telecasting a National Geographic special on President Reagan's pelvic plumbing.
Martin Nolan
#61. 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.
John Doolittle
#62. Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail ... President Reagan is clearly failing.
Newt Gingrich
#63. President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
#64. 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.
William L. Jenkins
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.
James David Barber
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated.
Nancy Reagan
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. [Ronald]Reagan and[George W.] Bush were far more radical than other presidents.
Kevin Drum
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Presidents don't get vacations - they just get a change of scenery. The job goes with you.
Nancy Reagan
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