First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer — not an easy answer — but simple."
"Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers."
"You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so."
"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
"As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers."
"I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines."
"No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote; but a Republican bucking the giveaway trend might re-create some voters who have been staying home."
"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."
"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war [in Vietnam] than the people have been told."
"Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."
"God made all his creations in different colors. It would be pretty boring if we all looked the same."
"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
"It's time for a change. You can sense it. Or, you can read about it any day of the week in the newspaper. Beatniks, taxes, riots, crime, delinquency, drug addiction, pornography. Our state is a leader in each of these areas...Common sense... says helping those who are unable to help themselves does not include taxing hard working men and women who are busy providing for their own families, in order to provide for lazy freeloaders who make welfare a way of life. Common sense wouldn't allow a few rabble-rousing malcontents to totally disrupt the campus of one of the greatest educational institutions in the world...VOTE FOR REAGAN-FINCH TEAM ON NOVEMBER 8!"
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."
"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"
"I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
"Every morning Nancy and I turn to see what he has to say about people of our respective birth signs."
"So much of our profession is taken up with pretending ... that an actor must spend at least half his waking hours in fantasy."
"Some seem to forget that I’ve worked with those on movies and television. I warn you. Television may be exciting, but always take what you watch or read with a grain of salt. The more extreme these people act, the more money they make. They don’t care about us. You should always do your own research using verified primary sources. Editorials or articles published can be exciting, but they are seldom the truth. This country will eventually be destroyed for the sake of a paycheck."
"I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary."
"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
"The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren't equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do."
"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."
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy.""