"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 1980s 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." -- Ronald Reagan







"Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong -- Ronald Reagan

"History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap." -- Ronald Reagan

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root. -- Ronald Reagan







"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." -- Ronald Reagan









"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray to God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest." -- Ronald Reagan







"Putting people first has always been America’s secret weapon. It’s the way we’ve kept the spirit of our revolutions alive—a spirit that drives us to dream and dare, and take great risks for a greater good." -- Ronald Reagan














"America is too great for small dreams" -- Ronald Reagan



















"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still." -- Ronald Reagan










"And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." -- Ronald Reagan












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

















"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." -- Ronald Reagan
















"They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. 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'" -- Ronald Reagan