Top 746 Quotes & Sayings by William J. Clinton - Page 11

We know that progress is not inevitable. But neither was victory upon these beaches. Now, as then, the inner voice tells us to stand up and move forward. Now, as then, free people must choose.

Our land of new promise will be a nation that meets its obligations, a nation that balances its budget, but never loses the balance of its values.

When you strip away all the little things that divide us, it's important to remember how tied we are

Our military superiority is so great - it's far greater than it was in the Gulf War, and the Gulf War was over in 100 hours after we bombed for 43 days. And so now they can bomb for a couple of days and then just roll into Baghdad... The odds are there's going to be a war and it's going to be not for very long.

Our campaign is the opposite of 'competence.'

I will never let Israel down.

What we believe in is what works.

It was Mario Cuomo's great gift and our good fortune that he was both a sterling orator and a passionate public servant. His life was a blessing.

When you're president, you learn to act like you know what you're talking about. And it's a great skill.

We should, all of us, be filled with gratitude and humility for our present progress and prosperity. We should be filled with awe and joy at what lies over the horizon. And we should be filled with absolute determination to make the most of it.

Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.

The economy has produced 6.1 million jobs since I became president, and if Michael Jordan comes back to the Bulls, it will be 6,100,001 jobs.

It takes a long time to turn a big country around. Just be of good cheer and keep working on it.

There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.

It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars.

During the sole argument we had when [Chelsea] was in high school, the subject of which I don't even remember, I looked at her and said, 'As long as you're in this house, being president is my second most important job'.

We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block.

I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me...and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out.

When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

I want the ability to monitor high-tech communications among far-flung terrorists. I want to be able to have our people learn their plans before they strike. That's the key.

Our paradigm now seems to be: Something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us. And if they don't, they can go straight to hell.

I will get things done for America.... Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground.... Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year. I am an Americorps volunteer.

Downsizing budgets may be necessary, but downsizing dreams is a decision to be disappointed.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

The fights I fought... cost a lot --the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.

Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax.

Being gay, the last time I looked, had nothing to do with reading a balance book, fixing a broken bone or changing a spark plug.

I don't think I would have become President if it were not for my school music program.

Where are the jobs going to come from?Small business, manufacturing and clean energy. Where's the money to finance them? The banks and the corporations in America today have lots of money that they can invest right now.

I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream really is alive and well again, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and justice and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you have to vote for Barack Obama.

The struggle for your own character is the struggle for the nation's character.

The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.

No generation has had the opportunity, as we now have, to build a global economy that leaves no-one behind. It is a wonderful opportunity, but also a profound responsibility.

Even if it takes changing the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.

Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life

The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.

The great thing about this game is that the bad days are wonderful.

I was an equal opportunity eater. Every ethnic group got a shot.

NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.

We have no intention of abandoning the American people to unproven theories and extreme positions. We're the people party and we're going to stick up for the people.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

It appears that some school officials, teachers, and parents have assumed that religious expression of any type is either inappropriate or forbidden altogether in public schools; however, nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones.

I love the HRC. The initials are great.

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible.

I want a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.

We should scrub all of our federal regulations to find responsible ways to make life easier to small businesses, i want to be a small business president.

We have the most religious freedom of any country in the world, including the freedom not to believe.

It's good for young people to be angry about something.

The earth is warming at an alarming rate, we are running out of fossil fuels, and it is long past time for us to take action to correct these problems.

The United States should.... avoid unilateral export controls and controls on technology widely available in world markets. Unilateral controls penalize U.S. exporters without advancing U.S. national security or foreign policy interests.

Music can give you your dreams. It will teach you hard work, it will break your heart and make you so happy, you can't stand it. . . .I don't think I'd have been president if it hadn't been for music.

No problem of human making is too great to be overcome by human ingenuity, human energy, and the untiring hope of the human spirit.

You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. America can lead the world towards that, but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction. There is a big difference.

People will vote for someone who [they perceive] is strong and wrong before they will vote for someone who appears weak but is right.

A significant number of petroleum geologists believe that we will reach the global maximum of petroleum extraction within this decade or that we have already reached it. Peak Oil happened in 1970 in America, when over half of our oil that we gained from the soil was exhausted ... This is very disturbing, regardless of global warming.

You can't blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity.

We know there are billions of stars and planets literally out there, and the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than 20 planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their suns - - and dense enough - - that they might be able to support some form of life. So it makes it increasing less likely that we're alone. But if we were visited someday, I wouldn't be surprised.

Nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories or information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye... Nothing can change the fact that technology can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way that technology works.