Smart things that Ronald Reagan said

This morning, I heard two men talking.  In response to something the first man said, the second said, “Trust, but verify.”  The first man replied, “That’s one of the few smart things Ronald Reagan said.”  The second man answered, “It’s the only smart thing Reagan said.”

Putting aside all the smart things Reagan did, such as helping our economy to explosive growth and fatally weakening Communism’s hold on large parts of the world, I thought I’d revisit some of the things Reagan said.  Maybe my standards are low, but I think the following quotations are pretty darn smart, whether one is defining smart as extremely clever or as extremely profound:

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

“I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”

“The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.”

“But at the moment I’d like to talk about another way because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. . . . Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.”

“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other

Do you have any favorites?