Top 521 Quotes & Sayings by Jimmy Carter - Page 8

The Superfund legislation set up a system of insurance premiums collected from the chemical industry to clean up toxic wastes. This new program may prove to be as far-reaching and important as any accomplishment of my administration. The reduction of the threat to America's health and safety from thousands of toxic-waste sites will continue to be an urgent but bitterly fought issue-another example for the conflict between the public welfare and the profits of a few private despoilers of our nation's environment.

If any agreement between two nations is to last, it must serve the best interests of both nations.

Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clearcut preference for these societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights. We do not seek to intimidate, but it is clear that a world which others can dominate with impunity would be inhospitable to decency and a threat to the well-being of all people.

If we do not learn to eliminate waste and to be more productive and more efficient in the ways we use energy, then we will fall short of this goal [for the Nation to derive 20 percent of all the energy we use from the Sun, by 2000]. But if we use our technological imagination, if we can work together to harness the light of the Sun, the power of the wind, and the strength of rushing streams, then we will succeed.

The drug culture has shaped at least one major change since the Sixties; It became the basis for overloading our prisons.

The first step in providing economic equality for women is to ensure a stable economy in which every person who wants to work can work.

Within the stable economy it's necessary to eliminate all forms of sexual discrimination, and to provide women for the first time in our history with economic opportunities equal to those of men.

We will have an unchallenged, open, panoramic opportunity on a global scale to demonstrate the finest aspects of what we know in this country: peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, benevolent sharing, love, the easing of human suffering. Is that going to be our list of priorities or not?

I can't think of a man more worthy of the presidency then my good friend Sam Nunn.

I have never been disappointed when I asked in a humble and sincere way for God's help. I pray often. I think I pray more often since January 12th.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel still stands. Our total committments to Israel's security and our hope for peace is still preeminent among all the other considerations that our Nation has in the Middle East ... But there need be no concern among the Israeli people nor among Jews in this country that our Nation has changed or turned away from Israel.

Carter is doing a high-wire act over a cesspool, preaching all the way. Sinclair Lewis, thou shouldst be living in this hour. We have a Warren Harding impersonating Elmer Gantry.

George Bush asked me if there was anything he could do for me, and I said, "Yes, you can help promote peace in Sudan after eight years of different policy." And he said, "I'll do it." So to make a long story short, he did it, not necessarily because I requested it, but they were very successful.

I believe that we should do anything we can to minimize abortion and not to encourage it.

Those who start war often know that because of their high political position their own lives will not be in danger. on the Diane Rehm Show.

People would ask me how I could stand the long campaigning, how I could stand being charged with the responsibilities of a great nation, one of the most powerful and difficult jobs in the world. It wasn't any more difficult than picking cotton all day or shaking peanuts.

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Genocide, in my opinion - is an attempt by a powerful group completely to eradicate from the face of the Earth the existence of people because of their ethnic makeup or because of their race or religion, and that was the case with Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews, and that was the case in Rwanda, when the Tutsis were attacked and over 500,000 were killed in two or three days.

I want to stress again that human rights are not peripheral to the foreign policy of the United States. Our pursuit of human rights is part of a broad effort to use our great power and our tremendous influence in the service of creating a better world, a world in which human beings can live in peace, in freedom, and with their basic needs adequately met.

I began to expand my personal service in the church, and to search more diligently for a closer relationship with God among my different business, professional and political interests.

The major violence now is because of a plethora, explosion almost, of rebel groups, all of whom oppose the government, and they're fighting each other, strangely precipitated by the fact that the United Nations and African Union has now planned peace talks.

On the basis of both values and interests, the natural relationship between Islam and the United States is one of friendship.

At the beginning of this year also, I called upon the North Korean side to open dialog between the responsible authorities of the South and the North at any place, at any time, and at any level, in order to prevent a recurrence of war and to cooperate to speed up the peaceful unification of our fatherland. However, no sincere response has yet been made by North Korea.

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

I have come to realize that in every person there is something fine and pure and noble, along with a desire for self-fulfillment.

But I am not discouraged. I do not despair for our country. I believe tonight, as I always have, that the essential decency, compassion and common sense of the American people will prevail.

My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.

I happen to be a scientist. My background is in nuclear physics. I was a nuclear engineer. But I don't see any incompatibility at all with my religious faith and God the creator of everything and the incompatibility between when the earth was created as specified in the Bible. I don't see any incompatibility there because those that were interpreting God's overall message didn't know anything about modern-day science.

The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Not one destroyed house has been rebuilt Ppl cannot live w the dignity they deserve

Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right.

No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.

Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world - water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution - if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

If I were president, I'd be very glad to see the Palestinians have a nation recognized by the United Nations. There's no downside to it.

It is generally not known in the world that, in the years preceding 1916, there was a concerted effort made to eliminate all the Armenian people, probably one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell any group. And there weren't any Nuremberg trials.

We all know grandparents whose values transcend passing fads and pressures, and who possess the wisdom of distilled pain and joy.

I think that, regardless of our culture, age, or even personal handicaps, we can still strive for something exceptional. Why not expand our sights instead of restricting our lives and accepting the lowest common denominator of a dormant existence? Faith. . . will permit us to take a chance on a new path, perhaps different from the one we now follow. It may be surprising where it leads.

We are grossly wasting our energy resources and other precious raw materials as though their supply were infinite. We must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned and rational way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature.

I will never lie to you.

Two problems of our country - energy and malaise.

The preeminent obstacle to peace is Israel's colonization of Palestine.

As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox's attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students.... There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.

The North Korean Communists are implacably pursuing their military buildup in defiance of the international trend toward rapprochement and of the stark reality of the Korean situation, as well as of the long-cherished aspiration of the 50 million Koreans. The North Koreans have already constructed a number of underground invasion tunnels across the Demilitarized Zone.

I guess my biggest failure was not getting re-elected. And I learned two things; one is that you ought not to ever let American hostages be held for 444 days in a foreign country without extracting them. I did the best I could, but I failed.

It would be naïve to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems ... However, with faith and perseverance, ... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace.

Rosalynn said, "Jimmy, if we could only get Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat up here on this mountain for a few days, I believe they might consider how they could prevent another war between their countries." That gave me the idea, and a few weeks later, I invited both men to join me for a series of private talks. In September 1978, they both came to Camp David.

I think it was fully justified after 9/11 to initiate a military action against Afghanistan, because we hoped to create a democracy, and have a flourishing economy, and to do away with al-Qaida, and to capture Osama bin Laden.

The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother's remark, There's more Arabs in this country than there is Jews! Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers.

It's politically impossible for any member of Congress to make a public statement condemning or criticizing the policies of Israel. It would be political suicidal for them to do so.

The blood of Abraham, God's father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God--an anguished cry for peace.

The reduction of nuclear arsenals and the removal of the threat of worldwide nuclear destruction is a measure, in my judgment, ofthe power and strength of a great nation.

Any system of economics is bankrupt if it sees either value or virtue in unemployment.

You have given me a great responsibility: to stay close to you, to be worthy of you and to exemplify what you are.

History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.

It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper - deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.

The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins.

I thought a lot about our Nation and what I should do as President. And Sunday night before last, I made a speech about two problems of our countryenergy and malaise.

When the laws are written and administered by the most powerful leaders in a society, it is human nature for them to understand, justify, and protect the interests of themselves and people like them. Many injustices arise from this natural human failing.

There are two major peace agreements. One is a comprehensive peace agreement that was consummated by the extremely beneficial intersession of the George Bush administration, who called on John Danforth, the former senator from Missouri, to negotiate a peace agreement after eight years during which President Clinton did not want to promote peace in the Mideast - I mean, in Sudan. And that's holding so far.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, “Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.”