Radio Personalities

"My experience is that people are most likely to listen to reason when in bed."

"I did a bond tour during the Second World War... We were raising money, and we played Boston and Philadelphia and most of the big cities. And we got to Minneapolis. There wasn't any big theater to play there, so we did our show in a railroad station. Then I told the audience that I knew a girl in Minneapolis. She was also known in St.Paul, she used to come over to visit me. She was known as "The Tail Of Two Cities." I didn't sell any more bonds, but eh... they didn't allow me to appear anymore."

"I like pancakes, but I haven't got a closet full of them!"

"I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally"? I never said that."

"They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He got nothing. Maybe twenty years ago, he might have been inspired. Today he's an original. The best, the funniest."

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."

"Here's to our wives and girlfriends... may they never meet! (Variation on an old Royal Navy wardroom toast: "Wives and Sweethearts! May they never meet!")"

"No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend."

"Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age."

"Reagan pulled together the Republican Party’s free-market optimists, ultraright libertarians, family-values moralists, and America Firsters. As had Nixon earlier, he won the votes of disappointed ex-Democrats disturbed by urban crime and resentful about stretching the aims of civil rights from nondiscrimination to corrective preference. Aided by superior speechmakers, Reagan had a fine ear for a divided country that relished partisan conflict while longing to feel good about itself as a nation. He appealed to both the left and right wings of American liberalism: New Deal Democrats and tight-money, big business Republicans. A divorced, nonchurchgoer, Reagan could tell a fundamentalist Christian audience with apparent sincerity that everyone was “enjoined by scripture and the Lord Jesus” to oppose “sin and evil.” He made the gospel of American liberty ring for latter-day Jeffersonians and Jacksonians across the West and Midwest proudly convinced of their self-reliance. He made it ring for whites in the South disturbed by dogooding liberal Northerners intruding once again on a society, it seemed, they did not understand, as well as for clever young libertarians scattered across the nation in its graduate schools. A good ear alone was not responsible for Reagan’s success. A thematic umbrella under which the factions of the right could gather was hostility to government. Reagan rocked audiences with jibes at the expense of “big government” so skillfully that they forgot that big government was what he was asking them to let him run. He spoke out against government spending and waste but watched deficits soar, boasting that he might be old but was not stupid, and never once sent Congress a balanced budget. No matter. In the antigovernment gospel, the right under Reagan found a thematic unifier that it had lately lacked. For each of the right’s factions, a convenient villain was big government: for business and banks, with its credit, work-safety, and consumer and environmental regulations; for moral conservatives, with ever greater liberal permissiveness of the law; for America Firsters, with its ruinous war in Vietnam, its foreigner-coddling multilateralism, and its boneless on-off flirtation with Soviet détente."

"When he saw injustice, he wanted to do away with it. He saw communism, and he wanted to put an end to it."

"President Ronald Reagan will be remembered in the hearts of all Latvians as a fighter for freedom, liberty, and justice worldwide."

"He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued. Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired. ... a truly great American hero."

"He's a big idol of mine. ... I campaigned for him. I handed out leaflets. I made phone calls in his behalf. This was at a time I wasn't even a citizen here. He made a tremendous impact on our country. ... It is easy to see how profoundly President Reagan changed the world. He made it safer, more free and gave hope and opportunity to millions."

"His commitment to overcoming the East-West conflict and his vision of a free and united Europe helped pave the way for those developments that ultimately enabled Germany also to regain its unity."

"Hungary and Europe do not forget Ronald Reagan's help and his support for the former Communist countries."

"He was great president who led the Cold War against communism to the victory of freedom and democracy... He was a good friend of the Japanese people as he respected Japan and its culture. The foundation of the Japan-U.S. alliance that now serves as a driving force to solve international issues with other countries was built during President Reagan's era."

"Ronald Reagan was a transformational president who made an enormous difference in our lives by leading the West to victory in the Cold War and allowing all free peoples to watch the disintegration of the Soviet Union."

"There's no doubt that the United States would be a very different country if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan. It may well be that the Cold War would have been very different if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan."

"President Reagan's leadership served to define an era of sweeping geo-political change … He helped lay the foundations for the end of the Cold War … His wit, warmth and unique capacity to communicate helped to make him one of the most influential figures in the second half of the 20th century."

"First of all, I should like to express from the very bottom of my heart condolences for the passing of President Ronald Reagan who was deeply respected by the people of the United States and who left many important achievements."

"During the arduous period of the Cold War, President Reagan showed great leadership and contributed tremendously to the advancement of democracy and free-market economy. In addition, President Reagan always placed a top priority on the maintenance of a sound Japan-U.S. alliance."

"This is an enormously sad day. President Reagan was one of the towering figures of our time, and the man who, with Margaret Thatcher, won the Cold War for the West... We, in Great Britain, as in so many other places around the world, owe him an everlasting debt."

"Ronald Reagan, in my view, was the greatest of post-World War II American presidents. More than anybody else, he followed the policies that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the final victory of a more free-market approach to the management of economies over the centrally planned approach in the old Eastern states. … His greatest legacy will be the end of Soviet communism."

"President Reagan was the Churchill of his era. His commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy and his boundless optimism for humanity will remain an inspiration for us all."

"The dialogue that President Reagan and I started was difficult. To reach agreement, particularly on arms control and security, we had to overcome mistrust and the barriers of numerous problems and prejudices. I don't know whether we would have been able to agree and to insist on the implementation of our agreements with a different person at the helm of American government. True, Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation. And this was the most important thing to me: he had the trust of the American people."

"Hillary and I will always remember President Ronald Reagan for the way he personified the indomitable optimism of the American people, and for keeping America at the forefront of the fight for freedom for people everywhere. It is fitting that a piece of the Berlin Wall adorns the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington."

"This is a sad hour in the life of America … Ronald Reagan won America's respect with his greatness, and won its love with his goodness … he leaves behind a nation he restored and a world he helped save … because of his leadership, the world laid to rest an era of fear and tyranny."

"It took several years before the American public turned against the Vietnam War. When the war began in 1965, two-thirds of the American people supported the war. Three years later, two-thirds of the American people opposed the war. That was a very dramatic turnaround. So the government decided that we're going to have short wars. We are going to have "splendid little wars"-and what could be shorter than President Reagan's war in Grenada? It was almost laughable that this tiny Caribbean island was perceived as a threat to the United States. All sorts of propaganda disseminated by the United States said it was going to be used as a Cuban or Soviet military base. Alternatively, the invasion was explained as a way to save Americans who were in the medical school and had to be evacuated, and so on."

"The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun..."

"Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience."

"If Reagan becomes President, it will be my father's fault. If J.L. had only given Reagan better pictures, he'd have never left the movies and gone into politics."

"The 1980s were a curious time — a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War. In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented the vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have."

"When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989."

"I understand and embrace the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's big tent within the party, big, big tent, remember? Ronald Reagan, great man, great guy. Remember he included Reagan Democrats and Independents and Republicans, a lot of people. We're going to have the same thing. There a lot of Democrats perhaps in this room, are there a lot of Democrats? Raise your hands. I mean, I don't think we need too many to be honest with you, but -- so I embraced the wisdom that my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy, Ronald Reagan. Stated by Ronald Reagan, pretty good."

"The epitaph of the Reagan presidency will be: "When Ronald Reagan became President, the United States was the largest creditor nation. When he left the presidency, we were the world's largest debtor nation.""

"The concept of Ronald Reagan as a master Mole for the Aryan Nation has not taken hold yet, in the centers of political power. Even his closest people still see him as a profoundly talented old man from Hollywood who will go down in history as perhaps the greatest salesman of his time.... But not as a philosopher-king or a serious political think, like all of those other presidents that he frequently quotes. They view him more or less as they would view Willie Loman if he had wandered through the looking glass and became president of the United States."

"Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears."

"He won the cold war without firing a shot."

"nothing but a bag of hot air."

"In America the 1980s were supposedly a rightward lurch, yet Reagan signed social security into law, established MLK day as a national holiday, heavily strengthened firearm restrictions, and did not curtail America’s public spending—choosing instead to use military spending as a form of economic stimulus. By standards of the previous era, Reagan was a consensus liberal—hardly a conservative. He shifted the Republican party towards the centreline of “acceptable politics,” and as such, narrowed what was and was not permissible on the political right."

"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?"

"[A] lapse into fiscal indiscipline on a scale never before experienced in peacetime."

"After carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology. He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency. He sees to it that nothing sticks to him."

"[the proposal [would force literally hundreds of thousands of students to disrupt their graduate education."

"I am old enough to remember the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, when the government fought a "war on poverty." In recent years that war has been transformed by representatives of both major parties into a war on the poor. More important yet, but less reported, is that in the years since Ronald Reagan was elected president, corporate America has waged war against this nation's workers."

"Republicans in Washington love to talk about "welfare reform." They like to cite examples of low-income people without jobs who are "mooching" off the taxpayers of this country. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan focused on a "welfare queen" driving a Cadillac-who, it turned out, simply did not exist."

"It is a national tragedy that the number of incarcerated Americans has more than quadrupled since Ronald Reagan first ran on a "get tough on crime" platform-from about 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today. And we spend $80 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars to lock them up."

"For many years, worker ownership enjoyed the support of both Republicans and Democrats. As Ronald Reagan said in 1987, "I can't help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step: employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.""