Most of my dreams came true. (told to biographer Lou Cannon in 1991)
We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look. (January 20, 1981)
It is time to realize we are too great a nation for small dreams. We're not -- as some would have us believe -- doomed to an inevitable fate.
The history of our civilization, the great advances that made it possible, is not a story of cynics or doom criers. It is a gallant chronicle of the optimists, the determined people, men and women, who dreamed great dreams and dared to try whatever it took to make them come true.