Bill Clinton Quotes
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I have said many times-if I hadn't been exposed to music as a child I don't think I would have been president.
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Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.
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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.
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We set forth on a journey to bring our vision to our country, to keep the American dream alive for all who are willing to work for it, to make our American community stronger, to keep America the world's strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity.
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I did a lot of work on energy efficiency at the White House. By the time I left we had taken the equivalent of six hundred cars a year off the road in reduced greenhouse gas emissions just in the White House complex.
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You don't have to be an elected official to be a public servant.
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Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion...
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The fundamental problem you have anywhere is when people think their lives and the lives of their children don't matter, they they are somehow disposable, just like a paper napkin after a lunch at a restaurant or something, if we want our freedom to be in deed as well as word in America, we have to make people feel that everybody matters again.
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Politics is for people who are too ugly to get into showbusiness.
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My fellow Americans, we can only build our bridge to the 21st century if we build it together, and if we're willing to walk arm-in-arm across that bridge together.
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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.
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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.
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To the extent that our workers compete with low-paid Mexicans, it is as much through undocumented immigration as trade. This pattern threatens low-paid, low-skill U.S. workers. The combination of domestic reforms and NAFTA-related growth in Mexico will keep more Mexicans at home. It is likely that a reduction in immigration will increase the real wages of low-skilled urban and rural workers in the United States.
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Palestinians are a hard-working and an incredible community. They have done remarkably well outside their country. I have never met a poor Palestinian in the United States; every Palestinian I know is a college professor or a doctor.
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No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean them - campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving again...
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What happened to us in September, 2001, is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the fact we live in an inter-dependent world that is not yet an integrated global community.
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People should really take care when they vote, and pay more attention to what people say they're going to do - instead of just how they feel about how things are going.
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If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that.
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In the new economy, information, education, and motivation are everything.
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I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside.
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What we need to do is to have a sensible approach to immigration. It needs to be open. It needs to be non-dogmatic and non-bigoted. We need to be firm but reasonable in the way we deal with the problem of illegal immigration. And we need to try to get as many of our immigrants who want to do so to become citizens as quickly as possible so that the American people will all see that this is a part of the process of American history, which is a good one for our country.
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America can no longer afford to get the Nobel Prizes while our competitors get the profits.
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Communications and commerce are global; investment is mobile; technology is almost magical; and ambition for a better life is now universal. We earn our livelihood in peaceful competition with people all across the earth. Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.
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I believe we can do much more to adapt to the structural changes in the global economy, get high-end manufacturing back here, set up clusters of economic activity where you have, among other things, continuous retraining of people well into their middle years so they never become irrelevant to the current job market.