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A people free to choose will always choose peace.

A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Don't be afraid to see what you see.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

Facts are stubborn things.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver five minutes longer.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

How can a president not be an actor?

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

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

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

I couldn't help but say to Mr. Gorbachev just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. We'd find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.

I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.

I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.

Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.

It's 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.

Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose - somehow we win out.

No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

One picture is worth 1,000 denials.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

People do not make wars; governments do.

Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

Some people wonder all their lives if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem.

Status quo, you know, is Latin for 'the mess we're in'.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere as long as the policy you've decided upon is being carried out.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere.

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

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

There are no easy answers' but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

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.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last - but eat you he will.

Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.

We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone.

We have the duty to protect the life of an unborn child.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we will always be free.

We're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.

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

Well, I learned a lot... I went down to Latin America to find out from them and (learn) their views. You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by the way he eats jelly beans.

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

Coersion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.

If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again.

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas - a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

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 first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government's primary concerns.

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals - if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy.

Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.'

I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values - at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where - because of our past excesses - it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that. And, I don't believe you do either. That is why I am seeking the presidency. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity. I don't agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding it proud position to other hands. I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to it

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

I am paying for this microphone.

Depression is when you're out of work. A recession is when your neighbor's out of work. Recovery is when Carter's out of work.

With regard to the freedom of the individual for choice with regard to abortion, there's one individual who's not being considered at all. That's the one who is being aborted. And I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't 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 man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order— or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy 'accommodation.' And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.

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

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this surrender, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face - that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand - the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for 'peace at any price' or 'better Red than dead,' or as one commentator put it, he would rat

You know, there aren't six people in this room who know how true this really is.

The only way there could be war is if they start it; we're not going to start a war.

There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay the price.

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

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

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow.

Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right.

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life the - unborn - without diminishing the value of all human life.

If you don't know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.

The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being.

Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value.

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

We must all educate ourselves to the reality of the horrors taking place. Doctors today know that unborn children can feel a touch within the womb and that they respond to pain.

Late-term abortions, especially when the baby survives, but is then killed by starvation, neglect, or suffocation, show once again the link between abortion and infanticide. The time to stop both is now.

We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.

We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

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

The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave.

Today we have done what we had to do. If necessary, we shall do it again.

Too much salt isn't good for you.

The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions.

We have found, in our country, that when people have the right to make decisions as close to home as possible, they usually make the right decisions.

Although I held public office for a total of sixteen years, I also thought of myself as a citizen-politician, not a career one. Every now and then when I was in government, I would remind my associates that 'When we start thinking of government as 'us' instead of 'them,' we've been here too long.' By that I mean that elected officeholders need to retain a certain skepticism about the perfectibility of government.

However, our task is far from over. Our friends in the other party will never forgive us for our success, and are doing everything in their power to rewrite history. Listening to the liberals, you'd think that the 1980's were the worst period since the Great Depression, filled with suffering and despair. I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully tired of the whining voices from the White House these days. They're claiming there was a decade of greed and neglect, but you and I know better than that. We were there.

The entire income tax system was created by Karl Marx.

I'm not smart enough to lie.

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.