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Quotes by Jimmy Carter

A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.
– Jimmy Carter
Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.
– Jimmy Carter
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.
– Jimmy Carter
An act of terrorism totally outside the bounds of international law and diplomatic tradition. a crisis that calls for firmness and restraint.
– Jimmy Carter
For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.
– Jimmy Carter
For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
– Jimmy Carter
Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.
– Jimmy Carter
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.
– Jimmy Carter
Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.
– Jimmy Carter
I have often wanted to drown my troubles, but I can't get my wife to go swimming.
– Jimmy Carter
I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me as president.
– Jimmy Carter
I now understand more clearly than I ever had before why you won in November 1980 and I lost.
– Jimmy Carter
I personally think that he did violate the law, that he committed impeachable offenses. But I don't think that he thinks he did.
– Jimmy Carter
I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.
– Jimmy Carter
If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
– Jimmy Carter
If you're totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.
– Jimmy Carter
In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: 'We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.'
– Jimmy Carter
It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.
– Jimmy Carter
Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.
– Jimmy Carter
My decision to register women confirms what is already obvious throughout our society-that women are now providing all types of skills in every profession. The military should be no exception.
– Jimmy Carter
New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there. Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.
– Jimmy Carter
Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.
– Jimmy Carter
The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, there is massive Islamic condemnation of the United States.
– Jimmy Carter
The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.
– Jimmy Carter
There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.
– Jimmy Carter
To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.
– Jimmy Carter
Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.
– Jimmy Carter
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
– Jimmy Carter
We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.
– Jimmy Carter
We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.
– Jimmy Carter
Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.
– Jimmy Carter
When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief. And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions.
– Jimmy Carter
Wherever life takes us, there are always moments of wonder.
– Jimmy Carter
You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.
– Jimmy Carter
You can't divorce religious belief and public service I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
– Jimmy Carter
You have given me a great responsibility: to stay close to you, to be worthy of you and to exemplify what you are.
– Jimmy Carter
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.
– Jimmy Carter
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.
– Jimmy Carter
You just have to have a simple faith.
– Jimmy Carter
When we go to the Bible we should keep in mind that the basic principles of the Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern day knowledge. So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. But the basic principles are applicable to my life and I don't find any conflict among them.
– Jimmy Carter
When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
– Jimmy Carter
When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land.
– Jimmy Carter
We must make it clear that a platform of 'I hate gay men and women' is not a way to become president of the United States.
– Jimmy Carter
We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.
– Jimmy Carter
We can't equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs.
– Jimmy Carter
Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.
– Jimmy Carter
There's no doubt that usually a president's public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.
– Jimmy Carter
The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy's deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or '79.
– Jimmy Carter
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
– Jimmy Carter
The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation.
– Jimmy Carter
The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.
– Jimmy Carter
Testing oneself is best when done alone.
– Jimmy Carter
On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.
– Jimmy Carter
My constant prayer, my number one foreign goal, is to bring peace to Israel. And in the process to Israel's neighbours.
– Jimmy Carter
It's very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.
– Jimmy Carter
It's not necessary to fear the prospect of failure but to be determined not to fail.
– Jimmy Carter
In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.
– Jimmy Carter
I've used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I've still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.
– Jimmy Carter
I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.
– Jimmy Carter
I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.
– Jimmy Carter
I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it's one that's easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.
– Jimmy Carter
I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God's eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews - everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.
– Jimmy Carter
I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War.
– Jimmy Carter
I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.
– Jimmy Carter
I don't think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn't at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.
– Jimmy Carter
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.'
– Jimmy Carter
I can't really criticize the Tea Party people, because I came into the White House pretty much on the same basis that they have become popular. That is dissatisfaction with the way things are going in Washington and disillusionment and disencouragement about the government.
– Jimmy Carter
I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church - things like that - I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.
– Jimmy Carter
I am confident that when the facts and policies have been examined, when the record of performances have been reviewed, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will once again be elected to lead our beloved country to a better future.
– Jimmy Carter
Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.
– Jimmy Carter
Because I know about the Holy Land, I've taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and - but you can't bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.
– Jimmy Carter
A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.
– Jimmy Carter