Ronald Reagan

"Its silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."

"So much of our profession is taken up with pretending ... that an actor must spend at least half his waking hours in fantasy."

"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."

"Americans dont go around carrying guns with the idea theyre using them to influence other Americans. Theres no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."

"I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines."

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isnt so."

"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a mans age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."

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

"Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Lets set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender."

"The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didnt die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, its a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwaters "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny."

"Shouldnt someone tag Mr. Kennedys "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy."