As a seven-year-old, I had definite opinions on Ronald Reagan.
Adam Scott
If we have George W. Bush as president, we're going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.
Al Franken
The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.
Alex Berenson
Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.
Alexander Haig
I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.
Ana Navarro
I became a Republican, before I knew what a Republican even was, because of Ronald Reagan.
I've been truly blessed. I've been a fly on the wall of history. I've been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.
Arthur Laffer
My godfather was a man named Justin Dart. Some of you may remember Justin Dart. My younger son's name is Justin, named after Justin Dart. I was executor of his estate, and he was my godfather. I first really got time to spend with Ronald Reagan with Justin Dart personally, one-on-one.
In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
Barton Gellman
The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.
If the United States had maintained its spending under Ronald Reagan, it is possible that the attacks of 9/11 - presaged by Islamic terror attacks on multiple American targets beginning with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - would have been stopped.
Ben Shapiro
When President Ronald Reagan asked me a stupid question once, I called him an idiot in public! I thought I was going to be arrested, but he laughed and appreciated me.
Bikram Choudhury
It is important that we take full advantage of the RSC's size, character and the passion of its members to advance our conservative agenda in order to restore America to the 'shining city on a hill' that Ronald Reagan envisioned.
Bill Flores
Here's one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan.
Bill Kristol
Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not - and more often than liberals - about most of the important issues of the day.
I registered as a Republican when I turned 18 because of Ronald Reagan - he was the president at the time; I admired what he stood for. I respected him.
Brian Sandoval
Ronald Reagan helped me become a Republican.
Bruce Rauner
When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.
Carla Bley
As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.
Cass Sunstein
The Republicans won the women's vote in 2010. It was the first time since Ronald Reagan that the Republicans had won the women's vote. And when you look at the issues that really drove women to the Republican Party, it's been the issues related to the economy, to jobs, the debt.
I still remember March 31, 1981, when a deeply disturbed John Hinckley Jr. took aim at President Ronald Reagan and fired shots that hospitalized the Commander-in-Chief and two others, and left his Press Secretary James Brady paralyzed for life.
So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.
I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That's the day I showed up for work at 'The New Republic' magazine.
Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.
Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.
There was a time when the Republican Party could discuss possible reforms to our gun laws: Ronald Reagan himself endorsed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994.
Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill - Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism - a much darker view, I think, of the world.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
The rule for effective governance is simple. It is one Ronald Reagan knew by heart. And one that he successfully employed with Social Security and the Cold War. When there is a problem, you fix it. That is the job you have been sent to do and you cannot wait for someone else to do it for you.
Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin's bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.
They say imitation is the best form of flattery. That is particularly the case if you're a U.S. presidential candidate and pundits are likening you to a conservative giant like Ronald Reagan.
Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.
Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.
I grew up admiring Ronald Reagan and Vice President Bush, and if I were old enough, I would have voted for 41. I was glad he won.
If you look at the very best presidents, the most effective presidents, they were always decent salespeople. Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective salesman, very tuned to the people he was selling to, very clear in what he was selling, very resilient and buoyant.
The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.
I like Ronald Reagan, who didn't play crass politics, and he just articulated and delivered on broad themes that were needed. Free markets meant free markets. Deregulation. Lower tax rates. Strong national defense. And he was credible and believable.
Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.
If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.
When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.
During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.
Ronald Reagan's vision of smaller government, less taxes, and a strong national defense has led to a prosperous America. As president, he rebuilt our military and reinvigorated our confidence in ourselves.
I don't have heroes, exactly, but I do have people I hold in high respect. Ronald Reagan, for example, stood for ideals that I value: integrity, patriotism and a fundamental belief in goodness and capabilities of mankind.
I stood respectfully as Ronald Reagan was sworn in to his second term though I disagreed with him on many issues. I stood as well for the inauguration of George W. Bush's second term though I thought his war in Iraq was a tragic mistake.
