Ronald Reagan Quotes

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the begining of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it.

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.

But let there be no misunderstanding. The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or our struggle against the spread of Communism during the Cold War.

Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.

The atomic bomb means the end of world war.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological nation plans for it.

I want Joe Stalin to know that if he starts something at four o'clock in the morning, the fighting power and strength of America will be on the job at five o'clock in the morning.

If Germany be allowed to win this war—then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defense of the democratic principle.

Nineteen forty-five marked the nadir of Western Civilization.

The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war...And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.

For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

I remember some of the limited debate I did back in high school in the late '70s, early '80s: nuclear proliferation was always the big topic, and it's bad. We don't want to see it.

The 20th century saw three great-power confrontations. Two of them turned into total war. We lucked out on the third. Do we really want to roll those dice again?

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

"World War III, was the Cold War".

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

That is potentially putting us all in the target hairs now is the reactivation of a new nuclear arms race. This arms race and this cold war is potentially hotter than it's been at any time in my lifetime.