"Government we recognized and respected as a referee, with certain power to restrain. But that restraint was to restrain the players in the game to keep them from harming each other and I submit that that is governments primary responsibility still, that mainly and no other. Now it's 40 years later and somehow government with the best of intentions has become no only the referee, but a player in the game as well. To many, he is viewed as the great provider of all good things and the regulator of our very lives. We've been told that modern times are too complex for anything but big government. Big government growing always bigger. Not even the Office of Management and Budget today knows how many agencies, bureaus, departments, and commissions there are in Washington, but the regulations they've spawned are recorded in the federal registry that has almost as many pages as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Businessmen have been told that if they all sell their product to everyone for the same price they are guilty of price fixing, and if they don't, they're in violation of the Fair Trade Practices Act. And sometimes they are found guilty of violating both at the same time by different agencies of the same government."
"As Dr. Parkinson said,'The government hires a rat-catcher and the first thing you know, he becomes a rodent-control officer and he has no intention of getting rid of the rat. They become his clients." - Reagan
"We haven't lost our moral fiber, we maybe have mislayed it temporarily. Actually, I think we should be happy about one thing and that's governments waste and extravagance. Can you imagine how miserable we'd be if we were getting all the government were paying for."
"There are those who say 'Oh but that's proof just that ours is a materialistic society." Is it? With that materialism we have more churches, more libraries, support by voluntary contribution, more symphony orchestras, more opera companies, more non-profit theater groups, and print more books than all the other nations of the world put together. We have more doctors per thousand people than any other country and one-third of all the young people in the world who are getting a higher education are getting it here in the United States."
"We fought hard and payed a higher price for freedom than any other generation that has ever lived. A few years ago, when the disturbances were going on the campuses, I had a young student rebel challenge me and he said, 'Your generation cannot understand ours.' He said, 'You , when you were our age, you didn't have instant electronic communication, nuclear power, space travel, cybernetics, computers figuring in seconds what it used to take men years to figure out." And that's true... we didn't have those things. We invented them."
"God has given us the responsibility of leadership. He has also blessed us for, if we doubled our present day troubles, were still better off than any people on earth. And he has blessed us by giving the people of this land a capacity for greatness that is needed to do, all that must be done. All we need to do is be like that farmer who finally took a vacation to Europe many years ago when it wasn't easy to do then. He was seeing the wonders of the old world and they were showing him Mt. Vesuvias and telling him the great power of that awful cataclysmic disturbance, that volcano that came on. And he listened patiently and then he said, 'We got a volunteer fire department at home, well put that out in 15 minutes.'"
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