With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.
Unlike the Reagan and Bush Administrations, with but one exception, the Clinton administration failed to reach out to Republicans in creating a new team, and eventually paid a political price.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years - and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.
It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'
Reagan proved deficits don't matter.
A bold reform agenda is our moral obligation. If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan's first year.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan's son. What a great honor.
Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn't know what he was doing. It's true he didn't know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible.
Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.
I learned a good deal about economics, and about America, from the author of the Reagan tax reforms - the great Jack Kemp. What gave Jack that incredible enthusiasm was his belief in the possibilities of free people, in the power of free enterprise and strong communities to overcome poverty and despair. We need that same optimism right now.
It's time for a 21st-century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn't 70 be the new 65? The last time Washington politicians tinkered ever so gingerly with the government-sanctioned retirement age, Ronald Reagan was in office and Generation X-ers were all in diapers.
Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
I helped Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp develop supply-side economics.
In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
Jimmy Carter began his planning in the early summer of 1976, Ronald Reagan a year prior. The Clinton Administration, elected in 1992, lingered in naming its team, and as a result, took almost a year to staff its ranks.
What we can borrow from Ronald Reagan... is that great sense of optimism. He led by building on the strengths of America, not running America down.
Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were talking to people who go bowling on Thursday night, and they were understanding what we were saying.
The reality is that during the Reagan years, for instance, we doubled the amount of revenue that we were sending to Washington, D.C. after the tax cuts took effect.
Reagan's approach will achieve one of the basic goals of the conservative: Things remain basically the same. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, or even a little poorer.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Our borders have got to be secured. You know, when President Reagan, who was one of my idols, granted amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants, it was based on the fact that the borders would be secured. That didn't happen. It didn't happen during the Bush administration.
Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong.
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I'm such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.
Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
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.
Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
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.
I think that Obama is very cool. And I think he's clever, and I think he can be witty. But I don't think he's funny in either the way that Reagan was funny - or John McCain and Dick Cheney are both funny in that ruthless, kind of mean way.
Under Reagan's policies, inflation and nominal GNP growth shriveled much faster than predicted, throwing off government revenue estimates and resulting in budget deficits.
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.
