Ronald Reagan Quotes

A government role in our society should be inherently suspect …. There is something inherently coercive in the nature of government.

I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

In almost all matters, the real question should be: why are we letting government handle this?

And since our country's founding, we've tried to keep government's heavy hand out of our personal lives, while ensuring that we do the most important thing, which is to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

I have always felt that the real purpose of government is to enhance the lives of people and that a leader can best do that by restraining government in most cases instead of enlarging it at every opportunity.

Big government squashes the human spirit

There are many things the government cant do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people. It cannot convert the people.

Government should do only those things the people cannot do for themselves.

To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.

I will raise my voice as long as God gives me sound or ability, against this Communistic idea that the Government will take care of us all, and everything belongs to the government. It is wrong!

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.

For liberty to expand, government must shrink. For the economy to grow, government must get out of the way.

Keep government out of the money of the people, schools of the people, and will of the people.

There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

The era of resisting big government is never over.

The New Deal is inconsistent with the principles of limited government and with the constitutional provisions designed to secure that end.

The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power -even the smallest and silliest kind of power - out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class -the class that knows what's good for us better than we do.

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government, and more for themselves

As government grows, freedom recedes.