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The Heart of a Great Nation: Timeless Wisdom from Ronald Reagan
With a foreword from Senator Marco Rubio, a stirring collection of Ronald Reagan's most inspiring speeches, offering his timeless wisdom and guidance for our day.
In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan said, "I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation--from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries."
The Heart of a Great Nation brings together Reagan's most powerful speeches, as relevant to our chaotic world as they were when he first gave them. In a period of our country's history consumed by economic stagnation, national instability, and the looming threat of communism, Reagan spoke directly to the hearts of everyday Americans. His wisdom on matters of family, freedom, and nationhood helped guide the country back to its founding principles and ushered in an era of prosperity and national pride.
Today, as we find our country treading similar ground, Reagan's wisdom speaks to us once again, offering guidance to everyone looking to navigate the present and remember the legacy of this great nation--which can one day be reclaimed.
In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan said, "I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation--from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries."
The Heart of a Great Nation brings together Reagan's most powerful speeches, as relevant to our chaotic world as they were when he first gave them. In a period of our country's history consumed by economic stagnation, national instability, and the looming threat of communism, Reagan spoke directly to the hearts of everyday Americans. His wisdom on matters of family, freedom, and nationhood helped guide the country back to its founding principles and ushered in an era of prosperity and national pride.
Today, as we find our country treading similar ground, Reagan's wisdom speaks to us once again, offering guidance to everyone looking to navigate the present and remember the legacy of this great nation--which can one day be reclaimed.
- GenresPolitics
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2020
8 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Reagan
305 books275 followersRonald Wilson Reagan was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party and became an important figure in the American conservative movement. His presidency is known as the Reagan era.
Born in Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. In 1937, he moved to California where he became a well-known film actor. During his acting career, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild twice, from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960. In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech during the 1964 presidential election launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. After being elected governor of California in 1966, he raised state taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus and implemented harsh crackdowns on university protests. Following his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination and then a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.
In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", which involved economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of stagflation. On the world stage, he escalated the arms race, increased military spending, transitioned Cold War policy away from the policies of détente with the Soviet Union, and ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He also survived an assassination attempt, fought public-sector labor unions, expanded the war on drugs, and was slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic. In the 1984 presidential election, he defeated former vice president Walter Mondale in another landslide victory. Foreign affairs dominated Reagan's second term, including the 1986 bombing of Libya, the secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras, and engaging in negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having seen a significant reduction of inflation, the unemployment rate having fallen, and the U.S. having entered its then-longest peacetime expansion. At the same time, the national debt had nearly tripled since 1981 as a result of his cuts in taxes and increased military spending, despite cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Reagan's foreign policies also contributed to the end of the Cold War. Though he planned an active post-presidency, it was hindered, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, and his physical and mental capacities gradually deteriorated, leading to his death in 2004. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Historical rankings of U.S. presidents have typically placed Reagan in the upper tier, and his post-presidential approval ratings by the general public are usually high.
Born in Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. In 1937, he moved to California where he became a well-known film actor. During his acting career, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild twice, from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960. In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech during the 1964 presidential election launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. After being elected governor of California in 1966, he raised state taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus and implemented harsh crackdowns on university protests. Following his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination and then a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.
In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", which involved economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of stagflation. On the world stage, he escalated the arms race, increased military spending, transitioned Cold War policy away from the policies of détente with the Soviet Union, and ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He also survived an assassination attempt, fought public-sector labor unions, expanded the war on drugs, and was slow to respond to the AIDS epidemic. In the 1984 presidential election, he defeated former vice president Walter Mondale in another landslide victory. Foreign affairs dominated Reagan's second term, including the 1986 bombing of Libya, the secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras, and engaging in negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having seen a significant reduction of inflation, the unemployment rate having fallen, and the U.S. having entered its then-longest peacetime expansion. At the same time, the national debt had nearly tripled since 1981 as a result of his cuts in taxes and increased military spending, despite cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Reagan's foreign policies also contributed to the end of the Cold War. Though he planned an active post-presidency, it was hindered, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, and his physical and mental capacities gradually deteriorated, leading to his death in 2004. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Historical rankings of U.S. presidents have typically placed Reagan in the upper tier, and his post-presidential approval ratings by the general public are usually high.
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March 15, 2021
I enjoyed this book, a reminder that presidential rhetoric—which has deteriorated since Reagan—makes a difference and has consequences in the world. While it contains most of Reagan’s memorable speeches—Inaugurals, Berlin Wall, The Challenger Disaster, etc.—it also contains many I had never read before. Curiously, the speech to Moscow State University is not included, which I think is one of Reagan’s best. It was ironic to read remarks he made in his first Oval Office address: “The federal budget is out of control, and we face runaway deficits of almost $80 billion for this budget year that ends September 30.” $80 billion then, trillions now. Amazing. “Since 1960 our government has spent $5.1 trillion.” We spent more than that in this past year during COVID. You’ll read the speech delivered at the Washington Hilton, where afterwards Reagan was shot. You’ll read Reagan’s March 8, 1983, speech in Orlando, spoken to the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, “the Evil Empire” speech, of which historian Henry Steele Commager said: “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve seen them all.” Let history decide, Mr. Commager, but not the revisionists.
Sit back and enjoy the first Oval Office address to his Farewell address—along with a couple of speeches after he left office—and the world-changing eight years in between.
Some memorable lines:
• In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
• Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
• All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.
• I’ve always believed that people’s problems can be solved when people talk to each other instead of about each other.
• We desire peace. But peace is a goal, not a policy.
• On May 8, 1985—the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day—Reagan addressed the European Parliament at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg, France. His remarks, were met with occasional boos, and some members of the audience made a show of walking out: “I’ve learned something useful,” Reagan ad-libbed in response. “Maybe if I talk long enough in my own congress, some of those will walk out.”
• Whittaker Chambers, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said . . . Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”
• As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: “This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
• Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, Professor John Hart Ely, now dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that the opinion “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
• Modern medicine treats the unborn child as a patient. Who can forget George Will’s moving account of the little boy who underwent brain surgery six times during the nine weeks before he was born?
• Reagan explained his opposition to quotas in the name of civil rights: “When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated in the Congress, Senator Hubert Humphrey, one of its leading advocates, said he’d start eating the pages of the act if it contained any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota. If Senator Humphrey saw how some people today are interpreting that act, he’d get a severe case of indigestion.”
• From a letter he said he received: “You can leave here and move to Japan, but you can’t become Japanese. You can move to France; you can’t become a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman; Greece and not become a Greek; Turkey—all of these. But anybody, anyplace, from any corner in the world, can come to live in America and become an American. And I guess that we’re the only place where that is true, and that’s what we’re all about. You know, it’s the magic and the mystery and the majesty of freedom. It’s your heritage, and wherever you go, be proud of it.”
• Can you think of a time when you heard of a West Berliner jumping over the wall to get into East Berlin? Can you think of a time when someone took a homemade balloon—hot-air balloon—and tried to float from free Western Europe into Czechoslovakia? Or when someone took a leaky fishing trawler on a death-defying journey so they could enjoy the freedom of Havana, Cuba?
• Thomas Paine said, “We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” We only have to act worthy of ourselves.
• John F. Kennedy said to a group of Nobel laureates in the State Dining Room of the White House that there had not been such a collection of talent in that place since Jefferson dined there alone.
• [There was an] editorial in the Federalist Connecticut Courant also announced that as soon as Mr. Jefferson was elected, “Murder, robbery, rape, and adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced.” Well, that was politics in 1800. So, you see, not all that much has changed.
• A lovely teacher was talking to her class of young boys, and she asked, “How many of you would like to go to heaven?” And all the hands instantly shot into the air at once, except one, and she was astounded. And she said, “Charlie, you mean you don’t want to go to heaven?” He said, “Sure, I want to go to heaven, but not with that bunch.” [Laughter] Maybe there’s a little bit of Charlie in each of us.
• Winston Churchill was driven into the political wilderness for speaking the unpleasant truth. Those who in their sincere desire for peace were all too ready to give totalitarians every benefit of the doubt and all too quick to label Churchill a warmonger. Well, time has proven that those who gloss over the brutality of tyrants are no friends of peace or freedom. Simon Wiesenthal has said, “When a hundred people die, it’s a catastrophe. When a million people die, it’s just a statistic.”
• “We the People” tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the government what it is allowed to do.
All of these works are in the public domain, and most appear in the fifteen Reagan volumes of the Public Papers of the Presidents series published by the National Archives and Records Administration. They can also all be found in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and on its website (ReaganLibrary.gov).
Sit back and enjoy the first Oval Office address to his Farewell address—along with a couple of speeches after he left office—and the world-changing eight years in between.
Some memorable lines:
• In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
• Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
• All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.
• I’ve always believed that people’s problems can be solved when people talk to each other instead of about each other.
• We desire peace. But peace is a goal, not a policy.
• On May 8, 1985—the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day—Reagan addressed the European Parliament at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg, France. His remarks, were met with occasional boos, and some members of the audience made a show of walking out: “I’ve learned something useful,” Reagan ad-libbed in response. “Maybe if I talk long enough in my own congress, some of those will walk out.”
• Whittaker Chambers, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said . . . Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”
• As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: “This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
• Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, Professor John Hart Ely, now dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that the opinion “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
• Modern medicine treats the unborn child as a patient. Who can forget George Will’s moving account of the little boy who underwent brain surgery six times during the nine weeks before he was born?
• Reagan explained his opposition to quotas in the name of civil rights: “When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated in the Congress, Senator Hubert Humphrey, one of its leading advocates, said he’d start eating the pages of the act if it contained any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota. If Senator Humphrey saw how some people today are interpreting that act, he’d get a severe case of indigestion.”
• From a letter he said he received: “You can leave here and move to Japan, but you can’t become Japanese. You can move to France; you can’t become a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman; Greece and not become a Greek; Turkey—all of these. But anybody, anyplace, from any corner in the world, can come to live in America and become an American. And I guess that we’re the only place where that is true, and that’s what we’re all about. You know, it’s the magic and the mystery and the majesty of freedom. It’s your heritage, and wherever you go, be proud of it.”
• Can you think of a time when you heard of a West Berliner jumping over the wall to get into East Berlin? Can you think of a time when someone took a homemade balloon—hot-air balloon—and tried to float from free Western Europe into Czechoslovakia? Or when someone took a leaky fishing trawler on a death-defying journey so they could enjoy the freedom of Havana, Cuba?
• Thomas Paine said, “We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” We only have to act worthy of ourselves.
• John F. Kennedy said to a group of Nobel laureates in the State Dining Room of the White House that there had not been such a collection of talent in that place since Jefferson dined there alone.
• [There was an] editorial in the Federalist Connecticut Courant also announced that as soon as Mr. Jefferson was elected, “Murder, robbery, rape, and adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced.” Well, that was politics in 1800. So, you see, not all that much has changed.
• A lovely teacher was talking to her class of young boys, and she asked, “How many of you would like to go to heaven?” And all the hands instantly shot into the air at once, except one, and she was astounded. And she said, “Charlie, you mean you don’t want to go to heaven?” He said, “Sure, I want to go to heaven, but not with that bunch.” [Laughter] Maybe there’s a little bit of Charlie in each of us.
• Winston Churchill was driven into the political wilderness for speaking the unpleasant truth. Those who in their sincere desire for peace were all too ready to give totalitarians every benefit of the doubt and all too quick to label Churchill a warmonger. Well, time has proven that those who gloss over the brutality of tyrants are no friends of peace or freedom. Simon Wiesenthal has said, “When a hundred people die, it’s a catastrophe. When a million people die, it’s just a statistic.”
• “We the People” tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the government what it is allowed to do.
All of these works are in the public domain, and most appear in the fifteen Reagan volumes of the Public Papers of the Presidents series published by the National Archives and Records Administration. They can also all be found in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and on its website (ReaganLibrary.gov).
Displaying 1 of 1 review