An American Life QUOTES

41 " As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

42 " I have often wondered about a paradox in American government: Every four years, voters elect a president and in California a governor, the only officeholders elected by all the people; then, the same people in their individual districts turn around and elect a legislature and congress that is often controlled by the opposing party, enabling it to prevent the president or governor from carrying out the things they elected him or her to do. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

43 " The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

44 " Throughout my life, I guess there’s been one thing that’s troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else. I probably got it from my father; Jack never bristled more than when he thought working people were being exploited. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

45 " Seamstresses had been working all night making uniforms for me. As I waited to be fitted, I looked over at a rack of uniforms tagged with the word “Custer” and the name of another actor. I watched a wardrobe man come in and gather up the uniforms, toss them like rags in a corner, and replace them on the rack with blue and gold-braided uniforms marked “Custer” with my name on them. I looked at those uniforms piled up on the floor and said to myself: “That can happen to me some day. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

46 " My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

47 " AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, I was a New Dealer to the core. I thought government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn’t trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn’t enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

48 " For years, I’ve heard the question: “How could an actor be president?” I’ve sometimes wondered how you could be president and not be an actor. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

49 " There probably isn’t any undertaking on earth short of assuring the national security that can’t be handled more efficiently by the forces of private enterprise than by the federal government. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

50 " No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

51 " The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

52 " I think there ought to be a regulation that the president could return a salute inasmuch as he is commander in chief and civilian clothes are his uniform.” “Well, if you did return a salute,” the general said, “I don’t think anyone would say anything to you about it.” The next time I got a salute, I saluted back. A big grin came over the marine’s face, and down came his hand. From then on, I always returned salutes. When George Bush followed me into the White House, I encouraged him to keep up the tradition. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

53 " BY THE EARLY 1960S, GE was receiving more speaking invitations for me from around the country than I could handle. And, although I was still saying the same things that I’d said for six years during the Eisenhower administration, I was suddenly being called a “right-wing extremist. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

54 " This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the 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. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s 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. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

55 " if there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy’s budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn’t spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers’ expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn’t be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

56 " The vast majority of students at the university only wanted an education. But for months they were robbed of it by the rampaging of a minority; meanwhile, many moderate voices on the faculty were silenced by the intimidation of left-wing professors whose vision of freedom of speech was limited to speech about things they agreed with. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

57 " Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

58 " The Democrats in the legislature agreed with us that welfare costs were headed for the stratosphere but claimed the solution was a huge tax increase—in other words, to keep pouring more money into a bucket that was full of holes. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

59 " As I have often said, governments don’t produce economic growth, people do. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life

60 " James Madison said in 1788: “Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. "

― Ronald Reagan , An American Life