William J. Clinton Quotes

Let us rededicate ourselves to the principle that all Americans have the tools to make the most of their God-given potential. For Indian tribes and tribal members, this means that the authority of tribal governments must be accorded the respect and support to which they are entitled under the law. It means that American Indian children and youth must be provided a solid education and the opportunity to go on to college. It means that more must be done to stimulate tribal economies, create jobs, and increase economic opportunities.

I was an equal opportunity eater. Every ethnic group got a shot.

Talk to people about what our real choices are ... Our way works better ... Stick with us, keep talking and think how much better it will be if we keep going forward together.

What we did with deeming rules were designed - it was designed to keep costs from coming on to the government that should be borne by families of immigrants who actually have incomes and can afford to pay.

Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.

My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism.

I came of age believing that, no matter what happened, I would always be able to support myself.

I ask you to join in a re-United States. We need to empower our people so they can take more responsibility for their own lives in a world that is ever smaller, where everyone counts ... We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American.

[George Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better.

There are fewer chemical pollutants in the air. Our drinking water is safer. Our food standards have been raised. We've cleaned up more toxic waste sites in three years than the previous administrations did in twelve. The environment is cleaner, and we have fought off the most vigorous assault on environmental protection since we began to protect the environment in 1970. We are moving in the right direction to the 21st century.

President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me now. No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.

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

So we, Democrats, have a responsibility there, every one of us, both to try to treat the Republicans with respect and as human beings to try to work with them on every issue we can, and then if those cannons are fired at us, we've got to stand up and fight back. If you lay down and you look like a deer caught in the headlights, then you will confirm the assault. And so we have to fight back.

Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.

True Excellence requires a worthy dream, a good Idea of how to realize it and the courage to risk failure to achieve it.

I love and revere the rich and proud history of America. And I am determined to take our best traditions into the future. But with all respect, we do not need to build a bridge to the past. We need to build a bridge to the future.

Let us all take more responsibility, not only for ourselves and our families but for our communities and our country.

I'm sure I spent more time in Texas than anybody else who had run for President recently.

Downsizing budgets may be necessary, but downsizing dreams is a decision to be disappointed.

If you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you.

Health care's complicated, can be misrepresented, it's personal, it can spark fear, it's expensive, and the people who have got the money want to keep it.

We should make it a crime even to attempt to pollute. Our children should grow up next to parks, not poison.

Along the way they're (MLB) going to lose millions of more American fans ...

I believe that those who promote discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or any other grounds are gravely mistaken about the values that make our nation strong. I will continue to move my administration in the direction of compassion, acceptance, and understanding.

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible.

Throughout his many years, he enriched the lives of countless others and served as a model of generosity and discipline to those he met, fostering an atmosphere of compassion, harmony, and unity. Sri Chinmoy was a leader, humanitarian, artist, athlete, and public servant who will be sorely missed. His legacy of kindness, reflection, and resolve will endure for many years to come.

Forget what you may have heard about a digital divide or worries that the world is splintering into 'info haves' and 'info have-nots.' The fact is, technology fosters equality, and it's often the relatively cheap and mundane devices that do the most good.

We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

Our relationship would never vary from its allegiance to the shared values, the shared religious heritage, the shared democratic politics which have made the relationship between the United States and Israel a special-even on occasion a wonderful-relationship ... The United States admires Israel for all that it has overcome and for all that it has accomplished. We are proud of the strong bond we have forged with Israel, based on our shared values and ideals. That unique relationship will endure just as Israel has endured.

The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.

You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security ... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.

Only astrophysicists new about the Internet 20 years ago. Today my cat has a website.

Politics is for people who are too ugly to get into showbusiness.

We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block.

The conservative Republican governors tend to be more oriented toward trying to work with Democrats and getting things done.

NASA even sent Chuck Berry's music on a space probe searching for intelligent life in outer space. Well, now, if they're out there, they're duck walking

If you wanna maintain 20 percent of the world's income with 4 percent of the world's people, you gotta first of all have more shared prosperity and shared growth.

You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say.

I want the ability to monitor high-tech communications among far-flung terrorists. I want to be able to have our people learn their plans before they strike. That's the key.

You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything.

The great thing about this game is that the bad days are wonderful.

But the truth is, countries have to do what is best in each instance to pursue both their interest and their values.

NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good paying American jobs. If I
didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.

It is time to stop personal destruction and prying into private lives

The stimulus is our bridge over troubled waters. And if it's invested well, it'll generate a lot of economic growth, and we'll get quite a bit of the revenues back.

What are the needs of the world? What can I do that won't be done if I don't do it?

I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.

I will never let Israel down ...

Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life

What we believe in is what works.

The most important question of the 21st century is not what or how much, it is 'How?' How do you propose to turn your good ideas into positive changes in other people's lives? You must be the 'how generation.'

I love the HRC. The initials are great.

Our big goal should be to make connection to the Internet as common as connection to telephones is today.

Our paradigm now seems to be: Something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us. And if they don't, they can go straight to hell.

Democracy does not have to be a bloodsport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.

[W]hen Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most devine and sacred gift.

When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one.

It is wrong, and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we have seen ... in recent years. There is too much of it, and we must do much more to stop it." "The fact is that employer sanctions have been in the law ... since 1986 but no prior administration has made a serious attempt to enforce them.

I'm just trying to suppress my natural impulses and get back to work.

America's greatness depends on the ability of its citizens to make the most of their lives. Americans with disabilities are an enormous, often untapped reservoir of that potential.

My plan after office is to get up and spend that entire first day helping my wife move into her new senatorial office.

She got to go to heaven four days early.

Just because we cannot do everything for everyone does not mean we should do nothing for anyone.

Our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can't escape each other. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community of shared responsibilities, shared values, shared benefits.

Politics is not religion and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology.

Some people say well we need a change. Hillary Clinton is been around a long, she sure has, and she's sure been worth every single year she's put into making people's lives better.

Though government has an important role to play in meeting the many challenges that remain before us, we are coming to understand that no organization, including government, will fully succeed without the active participation of each of us. Volunteers are vital to enabling this country to live up to the true promise of its heritage

We will lower the tax burden on middle class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in their income tax rate.

Four years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own web page. I'm amazed at that. I meet kids all the time, been talking to my cat on the Internet.

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.

Supporters of capital punishment bear a special responsibility to ensure the fairness of this irreversible punishment.

One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well.

There is nothing more precious to a parent than a child, and nothing more important to our future than the safety of all our children.

Together, people with good hearts and fine minds can move the world.

If you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade ... a real change-maker represents a real threat. So your only option is to create a cartoon, a cartoon alternative, then run against the cartoon. Cartoons are two-dimensional; they're easy to absorb.

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them.

In our own country, we have seen America pay a terrible price for any form of discrimination. And we have seen us grow stronger as we have steadily let more and more of our hatreds and our fears go, as we have given more and more of our people the chance to live their dreams. That is why the flame of our Statue of Liberty, like the Olympic flame carried all across America by thousands of citizen heroes, will always burn brighter than the fires that burn our churches, our synagogues, our mosques, always.

We all have to learn to live together.

Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree.

On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment.

Never tell anyone to go to hell unless you can make 'em go.

We should not let our response to the people who disagree with us be dictated by what they say about us or even how they treat people we care for. There has to be a chance that we can find love.

Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.

Let me be clear: we are still a nation of immigrants, and we honor all those immigrants who are working hard to become new citizens.

It simply doesn't make any sense for us to have illegal aliens in our custody in our courts and then let them go back to living here illegally. That's wrong and we should stop it.

I want American Dream growth - lots of new businesses, well-paying jobs, and American leadership in new industries, like clean energy and biotechnology.

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.

Poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth.

You should have disagreements with your leaders and your colleagues, but if it becomes immediately a question of questioning people's motives, and if immediately you decide that somebody who sees a whole new situation differently than you must be a bad person and somehow twisted inside, we are not going to get very far in forming a more perfect union.

Most illegal immigrants are not by nature lawbreakers. Most are looking for the chance to live in dignity. Nevertheless we must continue to discourage illegal immigration for it undermines control of our borders ... and even more punishes hard-working people who play by the rules and who wait for their turn to come to the United States. Therefore we must enforce our laws, but we will do so with justice and fairness.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.

We find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well.

When I was a younger man and had a life, I owned an El Camino pickup in the '70s. It was a real sort of Southern deal. I had Astroturf in the back.

If a President of the United States ever lied to the American people he should resign.

The economy has produced 6.1 million jobs since I became president, and if Michael Jordan comes back to the Bulls, it will be 6,100,001 jobs.

It's only in America where there seems to be this sort of systematic denial of the reality of global warming at the governmental level, and in too many sectors of the high, the private sector. But it looks to me the business community may actually lead us toward a clean energy future almost in spite of government policy.

What you earn depends on what you learn.

The more children see of violence, the more numb they are to the deadly consequences of violence. Now, video games like 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Killer Instinct,' and 'Doom,' the very game played obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make our children more active participants in simulated violence.

We are moving people from welfare to work. On welfare, we launch a quiet revolution.