Quotes from 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.'

Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right.

I think my wife ... is sure of my loyalty.... She knows how hard I work. She knows how tired I am every night. She knows I have fifty or sixty reporters watching me day and night.

The first step in providing economic equality for women is to ensure a stable economy in which every person who wants to work can work.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

The government ought to stay out of the prayer business.

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.

In every instance that I have known of with confrontation with the government and the press, the press was always right. So keep it up.

It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.

Later, when Bob Hope came to visit us, he made a wisecrack about being a Republican and I announced that he would be moving from the Lincoln Bedroom to sleep in Amy's tree house.

Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.

Every day in the United States, seventeen children are killed by gunfire. That's about 6,000 children each year who are killed by guns, as compared, for example, with about 3,000 a year who died at the height of the polio epidemic of the 1950s. We rose up as a society to fight against polio. Why do we not act more forcefully to halt today's even greater scourge?

A person should have as our goal complete agape (self-sacrificial love). The most we can expect from a society is to institute simple justice.

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

We cannot change the history of the past.

Kennedy's opposition to our plan proved fatal; his was a powerful voice, and he and his supporters were able to block its passage. We lost a good chance to provide comprehensive national health care, and another thirty years would pass before such an opportunity came again, with just partial implementation.

Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.

As we ask God for some blessing, we have an obligation to participate ourselves in the fulfillment of those dreams, aspirations, hopes, and ideas.

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens. As Americans, we are blessed with circumstances that protect our human rights and our religious freedom, but for many people around the world, deprivation and persecution have become a way of life.

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.

The life of every human being on earth can depend on the experience, judgment, and vigilance of the person in the Oval Office.

You only have to have two loves in your life: for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love. They're the guiding lights of a life.