Quotes from James Earl Carter, Jr.

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes and we must.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

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.

We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.

The most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them.

War and good health are incompatible. There's no way we can go [eradicate diseases] into an area that is at war.

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

To be true to ourselves, we must be true to others. We will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home, for we know that the trust which our Nation earns is essential to our strength.

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.

Any system of economics is bankrupt if it sees either value or virtue in unemployment.

It is apparent that prisoners of war are among the most vulnerable of people. Not only are they completely under the control of their captors, but in a time of conflict, the hatred and brutality of the battlefield are very likely to be mirrored within military prison walls.

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.

We are completely in bed with the Israelis to the detriment of the wellbeing of the Palestinians.