Top 746 Quotes & Sayings by William J. Clinton - Page 13

President Obama is going to have to run against himself. In tough times, nobody can defeat himself.

You don't have to be an elected official to be a public servant.

[Alternative energy] will make us less dependent on foreign oil. It would make us more secure in our future. It would mean that our foreign policy could be a reflection of our values and our other interests, and not just that.

When I was president, I knew exactly what I wanted to do every day to bring America together and create a greater sense of opportunity and a larger sense of responsibility and a stronger sense of community.

There is no example on the planet of a successful economy with broadly shared prosperity and a shrinking, weak government.

I try to be self-analytical, both to outline the mistakes I made in my life and try to explain why I did, and the things that on balance I did pretty well on.

The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world.

I think actually that the speech work I do is fine. It's important, because I try to help people think about what's going on and organize their lives accordingly.

All of us have to do a better job of teaching young people not to let themselves be defined by the words other people use against them.

My view is there will be problems and bad people as long as the earth exists, and since we're moving into a completely interdependent global environment, we're better off building a world we'd like to live in when the United States are not the only military superpower. That is, we need to build a world of shared responsibility, shared benefits, and shared commitment to our common humanity.

We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

If you take advantage of the fact that technology abolishes distance, then you won't need to go to India. Just go to Indiana.

When you're president, the Democrats got to feel good when they walk in the door if you're a Republican; if you're a Democrat, the Republican has to feel like you're listening. And you should be listening.

A parent may be without a job, but no child should be without a doctor.

Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas.

All of us in our administration worked hard to support families in raising their children and succeeding at work.

I wanted to continue to be active on those things that I cared about when I was president where I could still have an impact.

That's what she [Hillary Clinton] is done with everything all her life. She just makes something good happen, and that's what you need.

I think the idea of moving to a cleaner energy future and doing more energy efficiency makes smart sense.

In general I saw my job as the first president whose full term would be served after the Cold War in a global information society where we were interdependent but not integrated. And therefore, we were vulnerable to the worst, and able to seize the best, of what's going on in the world.

There's this whole problem of trafficking, which has gotten worse in the economic downturn, which disproportionately affects young women, but also affects some young men who are sold into bondage, into basically servitude for indebted work that they can often never escape from.

I mean my life was a combination of fascination with other people, with politics, and with policy, and the impact of government decisions on people's lives and the life of our nation and the life of the world.

If we have the right preventive and primary care, if we start charging for comprehensive care in the chronic cases, 10 percent of the cases take up two-thirds of the medical expenses, and if we do more on problems like childhood obesity, that we can, to use the parlance that's popular in Washington, bend the cost curve and eventually reconcile this so our costs will be closer to our competitors and so we can cover everybody.

Nothing in our lifetimes has been more heartening than when people of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe broke the grip of communism. We have aided their progress and I am proud of it.

If you look at what's happened to the stock market, if you look at what's happened to housing values, if you look at what's happened to bank loan portfolios because the value of their other assets that they've already issued loans against were going down, there was a pretty good argument for trying to pass something at about this level of investment with the divisions as they were - unemployment, food stamps, and tax cuts, aid to education and healthcare, and job creation.

Health care's complicated, can be misrepresented, it's personal, it can spark fear, it's expensive, and the people who have got the money want to keep it.