Ronald Reagan Quotes

World history is tragic.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything, I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

We all want peace. Unfortunately, there are times when peace must be defended by fighting terror and tyranny.

We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.

People almost never give up their freedoms — including, at times, the right to kill and impoverish one another — unless forced to do so; and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.

We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

We shall not fight for the preservation of the enemy, which has laid waste with death and desolation the fields and hills of Ireland for 700 years.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.

Found everybody in a terrible state of excitement on account of the enemy's advance upon this place.

History has been the history of warfare.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

We love peace, but not peace at any price.

The great question, is there anything at all which is worth fighting such a war about, with the devastating loss it will bring? I believe yes, there are some freedoms which to sacrifice would be EVEN worse.

War is a blessing compared with national degradation.

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face.