Jimmy Carter Quotes
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I believe that anyone can be successful in life, regardless of natural talent or the environment within which we live. This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame, but adhering to God's standards of truth, justice, humility, service, compassion, forgiveness, and love.
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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.
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I can't deny I'm a better ex-president than I was a president.
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I am not here as a public official, but as a citizen of a troubled world who finds hope in a growing consensus that the generally accepted goals of society are peace, freedom, human rights, environmental quality, the alleviation of suffering, and the rule of law.
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Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
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Ladies and gentlemen: War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
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It would be a fruitless search to look through the Scriptures and find one single instance where Jesus did not treat women either equal or superior to men.
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The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.
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I think I governed effectively. I don't have any doubts about that. I had the benefit, when I was in office, of having an excellent relationship with the Republican Party. We had superb bipartisan support and we had the highest batting average of any president since the Second World War, except Lyndon Johnson. He had a little better average than I did.
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As far as being in dangerous situations around the world is concerned, I always have a Secret Service detail with me as one of the privileges of a former President.
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On both of my major trips to North Korea, the leaders of the country made it plain that they want to make progress towards doing away with nuclear weapons and towards ending the longstanding, official state of war which persists between North Korea and the United States and South Korea, a war which has continued since the ceasefire over fifty years ago. That sort of thing happens quite often when we meet with people who are kind of international outcasts with whom the government of the United States won't meet.
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I guess my biggest failure was not getting reelected. The loss taught me 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.
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We have been involved in more wars, on a bilateral basis, since the United Nations was formed than any other country by far.
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Most Nobel Laureates have carried out our work in safety, but there are others who have acted with great personal courage. None has provided more vivid reminders of the dangers of peacemaking than two of my friends, Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, who gave their lives for the cause of peace in the Middle East.
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Whether the borders that divide us are picket fences or national boundaries, we are all neighbors in a global community.
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America has about three times as many abortions as they have in Norway, or Sweden, or Nordic countries, and they don't have any laws at all about abortion, but they care for women and infant children, which is a major cause for abortion.
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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.
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I see an America on the move again, united, a diverse and vital and tolerant nation, entering our third century with pride and confidence, an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people. This is the America we want. This is the America that we will have.
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We have already found a high degree of personal liberty, and we are now struggling to enhance equality of opportunity. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our natural beauty preserved; the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced.
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The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It's a problem that we will not be able to solve in the next few years, and it's likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
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When combined, the small individual contributors of caring, friendship, forgiveness, and love, each of us different from our next-door neighbors, can form a phalanx, an army, with great capability.
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As a matter of fact, although we had some terrible challenges and temptations when I was in office, we never dropped a bomb... we never launched a missile... and we never fired a bullet. I think that one of the main requirements for a strong military, like a strong submarine force, is to prevent war, not to cause war.
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Iraq is an unjust war. I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false.
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My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm not running for president.