There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.
Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I'm truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can't really put my finger on any huge impact she's had.
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.
Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.
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.
I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.
You know, I left the country when Reagan got in; I went to France.
Again, President Reagan was sort of an amiable presence out at the ranch by the last 6 months of his presidency. He had no effect on national policy at all.
People in my hometown voted for President Reagan - for many, like my grandpa, he was their first Republican - because he promised that tax cuts would bring higher wages and new jobs. It seemed he was right, so we voted for the next Republican promising tax cuts and job creation, George W. Bush. He wasn't right.
There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.
Without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan there would probably still be a Soviet Union.
Actually, my wine was served at the White House twice. Reagan must have been asleep when he ordered it.
After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.
Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.
I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, 'I don't know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.'
Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is, 'We are above that now. We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something.' I mean, in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above - above the world. He's sort of God. He's going to bring all different sides together.
When my father, Ronald Reagan, was running for president in 1980, my mother, Nancy, traveled with him on the campaign trail, but she did not give speeches or even many interviews. She never stood in front of a group of reporters and expounded on her views and opinions.
The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'
The problem with some of our noisier exponents of 'American exceptionalism' is that they lack Reagan's moral maturity.
President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution. Then he raised taxes and in '92 ran as an establishment moderate - same candidate, two very different campaigns.
The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.
Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability.
Ronald Reagan was a president of strength. His philosophy was a philosophy of strength - a strong military, a strong economy and strong families.
To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated some significant arms reduction deals with the then-Soviet Union, he was considered a real hero, someone who was advocating for peace.
He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.
When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.
Government actually grew during the Reagan years.
When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that's when he crossed his final threshold.
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
I just have that sense this is the reason we got Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court in the first place is because Ronald Reagan was running for President.
The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.
