Gipper Quotes

He's cutting the heart out of the American dream to own a home and have a good job ... and still he's popular Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan

He's a beautiful man, but I'm sorry he doesn't agree with my political philosophy Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan

Don’t underrate ordinary human decency,” Josh said quietly. “There’s more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.

Romney sounds like he wants to be the nice uncle in a sitcom, Santorum sounds like he wants to be a twelfth-century archbishop, Gingrich sounds like he wants to go to outer space, and Paul sounds like he came from there.

It's not such a bad idea, at any time, to be seen as FIGHTING, especially when you might just win.

Now I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. He was long before your time, but you all know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. And the last thing he said to me, "Rock," he said, "sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock," he said, "but I'll know about it and I'll be happy."

Going into the Republican Party National Convention, in all objective truth, our non‑winning front‑runners are the sorriest collection of stuffed shirts, empty suits, self‑gratulatory ignorami, and outright wig‑flipped ding‑dongs in the history of the Republic.

Where did you find construction guys swapping dirty jokes in proto-Númenorean?” Aura asked. “On construction sites. Is that coffee ready?

In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected.

The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.

... they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn’t understand tractor pulls, either.

Fox News gets to the heart of the Zombie Reagan story: Well, Jeremy, of course on line polls are not at all scientific, in fact they’re pretty much completely bogus and in this case it’s one that was made up on the spot by a high school student, but we all know that misleading non-information is always better than dead air, so here goes. The earliest survey taken since the rather startling resurrection of the former president is looking awfully good for the challenger and awfully not good for President Obama.

Of course you would, Mitt," Reagan said. "Well, I’m glad we understand each other, and I think your father would be proud of you being in his old spot, and I want you to know that when I’m choosing my Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, your resumé will be on the very top of the pile. It’s been great chatting with you but you know, I have to find a vice presidential candidate, and soon.” “Ha, ha, ha, ah it’s been great chatting with you, too, Mr. President, and—” Reagan cocked his head slightly, smiled, and caught the eye of a minion; a moment later Romney had been deposited outside the door like a discarded room service tray, having barely had time to shift from ha, ha, ha back to ah…ah…

Newt Gingrich, Reagan reflected, had never in his life fit properly into a suit. He still looked like the fat, despised, teacher’s-pet, suck-up junior debating whiz who was going to fall apart in his senior year, except he was now fifty years past it. Back when I was alive, he had that same querulous expression of a guy who didn’t understand two big things:
 1. being smart doesn’t make you popular, and 2. even if it did, he isn’t smart enough for it to work for him. He remembered trying to explain it to Nancy, who had told him that, “Ronnie, granted that Newt is sometimes irritating, you have to admit he’s brighter than most Congressmen—” “So is every horse out at Rancho del Cielo, Mommy, and half the rocks for that matter,” he’d said.

Our supposed leader was Miss Joyce, who had been working as a civil servant in the department since its foundation forty-five years earlier in 1921. She was sixty-three years old and, like my late adoptive mother Maude, was a compulsive smoker, favouring Chesterfield Regulars (Red), which she imported from the United States in boxes of one hundred at a time and stored in an elegantly carved wooden box on her desk with an illustration of the King of Siam on the lid. Although our office was not much given to personal memorabilia, she kept two posters pinned to the wall beside her in defence of her addiction. The first showed Rita Hayworth in a pinstriped blazer and white blouse, her voluminous red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, professing that ‘ALL MY FRIENDS KNOW THAT CHESTERFIELD IS MY BRAND’ while holding an unlit cigarette in her left hand and staring off into the distance, where Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin were presumably pleasuring themselves in anticipation of erotic adventures to come. The second, slightly peeling at the edges and with a noticeable lipstick stain on the subject’s face, portrayed Ronald Reagan seated behind a desk that was covered in cigarette boxes, a Chesterfield hanging jauntily from the Gipper’s mouth. ‘I’M SENDING CHESTERFIELDS TO ALL MY FRIENDS. THAT’S THE MERRIEST CHRISTMAS ANY SMOKER CAN HAVE – CHESTERFIELD MILDNESS PLUS NO UNPLEASANT AFTER-TASTE’ it said, and sure enough he appeared to be wrapping boxes in festive paper for the likes of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who, I’m sure, were only thrilled to receive them

Mitt Romney's first interview with Zombie Reagan: Mitt Romney came in with cheerful assurance, because he wasn’t capable of anything else. “Let me first welcome you back to this side of the veil, Mr. President.” “Yeah, Mitt, it’s good to see you looking so well. Your father says hello, and he wanted me to add specially that whatever unfortunate negative things you might remember him saying to you when you were a kid, he always tried to tell you the truth and he hopes you’ve used it to improve, and he understands that even with the help of those comments, it might just not have been in you to improve. He wants you to remember he still loves you no matter what you’ve become, or even if you haven’t chosen to become any one thing in particular.” “That’s very kind. I miss my dad even now.” “Oh, so do I. I remember George as always that kind of guy, he had your back, whenever you’d think to watch your back, you’d find him somewhere around there, ready for action with that knife already drawn.

typewriter.

would

Hemingway

For Reagan,for his contemporaries, and many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation's stepping back from necessary toughness

Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven and you didn't have one too, I would give mine away and go to hell with you. Ronald Reagan

My priority is to see that some people don’t suffer for the good of others.

O’Neill was perceptive enough to understand the country had a new leader that it wanted to believe in. After the tragedy of Dallas, after the quicksand of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, it needed one.

up

and gentlemen,

on-air appearance you could see that the secretary of state

With a year left in the Gipper’s administration, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal signaled “the end of the Age of Reagan” and his time in Washington was marked by “more disgraces than can fit in a nursery rhyme.

The week of the Gipper’s death, syndicated liberal cartoonist Ted Rall would show an absence of tact and an absence of a soul when he said, “I’m sure he’s turning crispy brown right about now.”9 A former conservative, Kevin Phillips, wrote in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor, “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America—an ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the richest third of the population and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance.

He was experienced enough to spot the downside of doing the right thing.

He'd made a name for himself out there in the world beyond not just in spite of the distinctly unfashionable persona he presented, but, perhaps, BECAUSE of it.

Each man had come to know the other's caricature as a lie.

Shared history was the coin of the realm.

Staffers tend to mimic their bosses, to take their key from them.

In politics there is a large difference between loosing and being defeated.

The author contrasts leadership styles he describes as wholesale and retail. The whole sale leader rallies groups to an overriding vision, and to him individuals are interchangeable. The retail leader knows everyone's details and uses personal touches to motivate.

The Russian people were just like us. They were victims of their own government. Ronald Reagan

He was making the inevitable pivot from critic to manager.

The author attributes part of the Carter-Reagan divide to their respective attitudes toward the city from which they governed. Carter was deeply suspicious of its coziness. Reagan intended to enjoy his temporary home even while delivering it from its reigning ideology.

Anecdotes came with his DNA.

The author deduces the best way James Baker serve Reagan as Chief of Staff was to continually remind him why he wanted to be president.

The author defines professionalism as exemplified by his subjects in their mutual unwillingness to take expected opposition personally. They would not allow grudges to get in the way of more important business.

You can call me Prez,” the other SEAL jumped in, pulling my hand away from Mickey’s. “Why Prez?” my dad asked. “Because I was named after the greatest President to ever hold the office. Ronald Reagan, God rest his soul,” Prez answered with pride, his hand over his heart as if uttering the Gipper’s name required the same respect as the Pledge of Allegiance. “Amen,” my dad joined in, shaking Prez’s hand. An immediate bond, born of conservative values, was formed between the two.

We’ll have to rent Knute Rockne, All American so you can see who George Gipp was.” “Now you’re showing your age, old man. You don’t rent anymore. You stream.” “Whatever. Ronald Reagan played the Gipper.” “Who’s Ronald Reagan?” she teased.

Historically, the coupling of president and Speaker has been a tricky one that encourages a choreography both quick-footed and wary

Even the bureaucracy does not shatter the stillness.

Trump defeated both of America’s major political parties, starting with the one he nominally belonged to. It was an extraordinary spectacle. The Breaker of the Idols did not come from the left or from the right. He came from below. He was unconstrained by piety toward the Gipper, by fealty toward the cause, by deep study of the Laffer Curve, or by adherence to the principle of noncontradiction. He spoke truth more often than his critics gave him credit for, but the way a child sometimes does, by accident, and then embarrasses the adults in the room.

World War II and the loss of Robin had taught him that life was “unpredictable and fragile,” a truth that meant those who were spared owed debts of service to others. He had come of age as a businessman and as a father under Eisenhower, whose conservative centrism had created the conditions for Bush’s own prosperity and happiness in postwar Texas. As a politician Bush had apprenticed in Johnson’s Washington, where presidents were neither angels nor demons but sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Under Nixon and Ford, he had learned about diplomacy, national politics, and intelligence gathering firsthand. And Reagan had given him an impressive model of leadership to which to aspire, even if Bush knew he could never match the Gipper as a presidential performer.