The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom

by Ronald Reagan

  Liberty has never come from govt. The hist. of liberty is the hist. of limitation of govt. power not the increase of it.

  Thomas Macaulay

  Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the people by confining themselves to their own legit. duties—by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry & intelligence their natural reward, idleness & folly their natural punishment; by diminishing the price of law, by maintaining peace, by defending property & observing strict economy in every dept. of the state. Let govt. do this—the people will assuredly do the rest.

  Daniel Webster

  Hold on my friends to the Constitution of the United States of America & to the Repub. for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster. What has happened once in 6000 yrs. may never happen again. Hold on to your const. for if the const. shall fall there will be anarchy throughout the world.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Socialism means equality of inc. or nothing. Under Soc. you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught & employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had no character or industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner, but while you were permitted to live you would have to live well.

  Frederic Bastiat Addressing Nat. Assembly—France, 12/12/1849

  Heavy govt. expenditures and liberty are incompatible. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state. Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity—all vanish.

  Calvin Coolidge, William & Mary, May 15, 1926

  No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self govt. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, reaction & decline of all forms of govt. those administered by bureaus are about the least satisfactory for an enlightened & progressive people. Being irresponsible they become autocratic & being autocratic they resist all development. Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted it breaks down representative govt. & overwhelms democracy. It is the one element in our insts. that sets up a pretense of having authority over everybody & being responsible to nobody.

  1927, Rev. Rauschenbusch “New Leader,” Official Soc. Paper

  The Am. people will never knowingly stage a revolution to bring about socialism. So we should promote the idea by increasing govt. control of business & having Socialists get govt. jobs. one man in govt. with his eyes & ears open can do more than a hundred men on the outside. They must work to promote more govt. control of banks, R.R.’s, & other businesses; to start a program of govt. ownership of elec. power & to work for pol. control & management of all key industries. (It didn’t bother the Rev. that people who wouldn’t knowingly vote for Soc. should have it forced on them).

  Samuel Gompers Last Speech Before Labor Convention

  There may be here & there a worker who does not join a union of labor. That is his right no matter how wrong we think he may be. It is his legal right & no one can dare question his legal exercise of that right.

  1924—Urged Fundamentals of Human Liberty: No lasting good has ever come from compulsion.

  Statue of Liberty

  Her name—Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand glow world wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Keep your ancient lands, your storied pomp; cries she with silent lips—Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

  Louise E. Weber, “I Love This Land”

  I may inhabit worlds in time to come of finer substance, born of further suns; a greater glory I may one day see, but oh today, dear earth, how I love thee.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Go to youth, form fighting squads everywhere. Let groups be organized of 3, 10, 30 persons. Let them arm themselves as best they can with a revolver, knife, rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires. Do not make membership in the party an absolute condition. That would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising. You must proceed with propaganda on a wide scale. Propagandists must supply each group with a brief & simple recipe for making bombs. Squads must begin military training. Some may undertake to kill, to spy or blow up police stations, others to raid the bank to confiscate money for the insurrection.

  Be prepared to resort to every illegal device to conceal the truth—It would not matter if ¾ of the human race perished; the important thing is that the remaining ¼ be communist.

  The communist party enters into Bourgeois insts. not to do constructive work but in order to direct the masses to destroy from within the whole Bourgeois state machine & the parliament itself.

  Joseph Stalin

  Words must have no relation to actions, otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, action another. Good words are a mask for concealment of deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water or wooden iron.

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Despite the difference between the stages of comm. & soc. no wall of any kind exists between them . . . communism grows from soc. & its direct continuation.

  Comm. Party U.S.A. Oath, 1930

  I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet U., the land of victorious socialism. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant & firm defender of the Leninist line of the party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S.

  Nazi Party on What Should Be Party Platform

  Demand that the state shall make one of its chief duties to provide work & means of livelihood for citizens. The activities of the individual must not clash with the interest of the whole but must be pursued within the framework of Nat. activity & must be for the general good. Demand therefore abolition of incomes unearned by work & emancipation from interest charges. Confiscation of all war profits. Nationalization of all business trusts. Great industries shall be organization on a profit sharing basis. The extensive development of provision for old age. & ed. facilities for specially gifted children of poor parents at the expense of the state. Our Nat. can only achieve permanent well being from within on the principles of common interest before self interest.

  Mussolini

  We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.

  Letter From a Young American Socialist to Friend Around 1968

  It is my life, my business, my religion, my hobby, my bread & meat. I have already been in jail because of my ideas & if necessary I am ready to go before a firing squad. We have a cause to fight for—a def. purpose in life. We have a morale an esprit de corps such as no capitalist army ever had—a devotion to our cause that no religious order can touch.

  Anonymous

  When govt. doesn’t know what it’s supposed to do, it ends up trying to do everything.

  Freedom rests and always will on individual responsibility, individ. integrity, individ. effort, individ. courage, & individual religious faith.

  We must pay a price for freedom but whatever the price it’s only half the cost of doing without it.

  John F. Kennedy

  The scarlet thread running through the thoughts & actions of people all over the world is the delegation of great problems to the all-absorbing leviathan—the state . . . Every time that we try to lift a problem to the govt., to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of the people.

  John Cotton, 18th Century

  Let all the world learn to give mortal man no greater power than they are content they shall use—for use it they will.

  Lord Denning on Economy

  What matters is that each man should be free to develop his own personality to the full; and the only duties which restrict this freedom are those which are necessary to enable everyone to do the same. Whenever th
ese interests are nicely balanced the scale goes down on the side of freedom.

  Lord Acton 70 Years After Adoption of U.S. Constitution

  They had solved with astonishing ease & unexampled success 2 probs. which had heretofore baffled the capacity of the most enlightened nations. They had contrived a system of Fed. govt. which prodigiously increased nat. power & yet respected local liberties & authorities & they had founded it on the prin. of equality without surrendering the securities of property & freedom.

  Sen. Benjamin H. Hill, 1867

  I do not dread those corps. as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are 1000 agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them; but there is a corp. we may all dread. That corp. is the Fed. govt. From the aggression of this corp. there can be no safety, if it is allowed to go beyond the bounds, the well defined limits of its power. I dread nothing so much as the exercise of ungranted & doubtful power by this govt. It is in my opinion, the danger of dangers to the future of this country. Let us be sure we keep it always within its limits. If this great, ambitious, ever growing corp. becomes oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes wayward, who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? As sentinels of the country’s watchtower, Senators, I beseech you to watch & guard with sleepless dread that corp. which can make all property & hope its playthings in an hour & its victims forever. Regulations once imposed, are never withdrawn but usually made tighter & tighter.

  Herbert Aptheker, “Daily World,” Communist Paper

  This capitalism—this system born of the slave trade & centuries of slavery, of child labor & the abuse of women, of contempt for those who labor & produce, with its adornments of male supremacy & elitism & racism and its products of colonialism & robber wars—this capitalism, through its politicians & its pen men, dares to lecture the world of socialism about morality & human rights. This system with its ghettos & barriers, its colonies & unemployment its impoverishments & hunger, its slums & closed libraries, its massage parlors & closed hospitals—this putrid system literally stinking up the atmosphere gives lessons in ethics to Communists!

  S.D.S. Leader During Campus Riots in the 1960s

  It’s not reform we’re after. It’s the destruction of your stinking rotten society & you’d better learn that fast.

  James Madison, The Federalist Papers

  The 1st question that offers itself is whether the general form & aspect of the govt. be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of Am.; with the fundamental principles of the revolution or with that honorable determination which animates every notary of freedom to rest all our pol. experiments on the capacity of mankind for self govt.

  Thomas Jefferson, 1st 18 Words Only Are Engraved On Memorial

  Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain, that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same govt. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be, pari passu, filled up by free white “laborers.”

  Aesop

  Bad as any govt. may be it is seldom worse than anarchy.

  Thomas Paine

  Govt. is a necessary evil—let us have as little of it as possible.

  Justice O. W. Holmes

  Strike for the jugular. Reduce taxes and spending. Keep govt. poor and remain free.

  “Take sides”—Phil. Romulo

  Freedom is precious—defend it—it is not cheap, nor easy, nor neutral. It is dear & hard & real—take sides for frdm. or you will lose it.

  Abraham Lincoln

  The people are the rightful masters of both Congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Const. but to overthrow the men who pervert the Const.

  Herbert Hoover

  The key is that among us there is greater frdm. for the individ. man & woman than in any other great nat. In the Const. & in the Bill of Rts. are enumerated the specific frdms. Then there are a doz. other frdms. which are not a matter of specific law—such as frdm. to choose our own callings, frdm. to quit a job & seek another, frdm. to buy or not to buy, frdm. for each man to venture & to protect his success, always subject to the rise of his neighbors. In short we have frdm. of choice.

  Thomas Wolfe

  To every man his chance, to very man regardless of his birth, his shining golden opportunity. To every man the rt. to live, to work, to be himself & to become whatever his manhood & his vision can combine to make him. This is the promise of America.—Rise & Fall

  Legend Declaration of Independence

  They may turn every tree into a gallows, every home into a grave & yet the words of that parchment can never die . . . To the mechanic in the workshop they will speak hope; to the slaves in the mines freedom . . . Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck—for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom—the Bible of the rights of man forever.

  Samuel Gompers Described Govt. Social Insurance

  Menace to the rights, the welfare & the lib. of the working man—cannot remove or prevent poverty—can’t take risk out—without denying freedom of choice.

  ON WAR

  Rev. Muhlenberg

  On a bright Sunday morning at the outbreak of the Rev. War—the Rev. was preaching his sermon when he was handed a note.—paused read the note then silently removed his ministerial robe. He was wearing the uniform of Wash’s army. “My friends there is a time to preach and a time to fight. This is a time to fight.”

  John Stuart Mill

  War is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest of things. The decayed & degraded st. of moral & patriotic feeling which things nothing is worth a war is worse. A man who has nothing he cares about more than his personal safety is a miserable creature & has no chance of being free unless made & kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

  Anonymous

  I want to say something about Army. When all the slick pants politicians have finished their work, and all the speeches are finished in the Senate & the House, and all the ultimatums have been issued and rejected, there comes a time when a soldier with a gun stands to defend his country. And so in the final analysis the most important thing we have are the fighting men in this country, because it will be them & no one else who will see that our freedoms are perpetuated for our children & for their children.

  Of all the men who have died in battle to preserve what we have today 88% wore the uniform of the U.S. Army.

  Dean of Canterbury, Talking About Civil War, 1863 (Rev. Henry Alford)

  Denounced the U.S. for: “Its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.” (The war that ended slavery)

  Thomas Jefferson

  If we are forced into a war, we must give up differences of opinion and united as one nation to defend our country.

  George Washington

  Dinner dialogue at Mt. Vernon between Lafayette and GW:

  L: “George you Americans even in war & desperate times have a superb spirit. You are happy & you are confident. Why is it?

  GW: “There is freedom, there is space for a man to be alone & think & there are friends who owe each other nothing but affection.”

  Sun Tzu 2500 Years Ago

  An army is only the instrument which administers the coup de grace to an enemy already defeated by intel. ops which separated the enemy from his allies, corrupted his officials, spread misleading info. & correctly assessed his strengths & weaknesses—winning 100 battles is not the acme of skill—to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

  Winston Churchill

  Still if you will not fight for the right when you can win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure & not too costly; you may come to the moment
when you’ll have to fight with all the odds against you & only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

  J.F.K.