Great Throughts Treasury

"They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism."

"They don't worship at the altar of forced busing and mandatory quotas. They don't believe you can remedy past discrimination by mandating new discrimination. (Defending his nominees for Civil Rights Commission)"

"They had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.'"

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

"They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps."

"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 its proud position to other hands. I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other free peoples of the world."

"This administration is totally colorblind."

"This country was founded and built by people with great dreams and the courage to take great risks."

"This law gives you the power to seek the release of Wallenberg... The law makes no distinction between honorary and other citizens."

"This kind of weapon can't help but have an effect on the population as a whole."

"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."

"Those who can lose the most usually do the least to change that."

"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."

"Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look."

"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. . . . We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, 'Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave-masters'."

"To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership - not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere."

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

"Today we Americans lost a hero who always seemed larger than life... Bear Bryant gave his country the gift of a life unsurpassed. In making the impossible seem easy, he lived what we strive to be."

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

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

"Tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history."

"Trust the people -- that is the crucial lesson of history."

"Trust, but verify."

"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."

"Violence has been Nicaragua's most important export to the world."

"We are heading towards socialism, a system that, as they say, only works in heaven, where they need it, and Hell, where it already exists."

"We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent."

"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life -- the unborn -- without diminishing the value of all human life . . . there is no cause more important."

"We are never defeated unless we give up on God."

"We believe faith and freedom must be our guiding stars, for they show us truth, they make us brave, give us hope, and leave us wiser than we were."

"We built it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it."

"We did not appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave yet, the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there."

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

"We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!"

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

"We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: It is better to be here [in Europe] ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent."

"We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much"

"We do not deny any nation's legitimate interest in security. But protecting the security of one nation by robbing another of its national independence and national traditions is not legitimate. In the long run, it is not even secure."

"We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule."

"We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution. (On Muammar Qaddafi of Libya)"

"We need you, we need your youth, your strength, and your idealism, to help us make right what is wrong."

"We ought to take a serious look and see if we haven't interfered with the democratic rights of the people."

"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 seek a constitutional amendment to permit voluntary school prayer. God should never have been expelled from America's classrooms in the first place."

"We share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight. We've never had a tragedy like this."

"We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace."

"We think there is a parallel between the Federal involvement in education and the decline in quality over recent years."

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

"We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development."