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Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter Quotes

39th U.S. President

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Famous Jimmy Carter Quotes

“There are more people now, more children, going without health care ... A medical team surveying twenty-five hundred poor children in the District found that eight out of ten had untreated medical or dental problems. The infant mortality rate in the District, already the highest in the nation and higher than that of many Third World nations, actually rose ... and prenatal care was considered an important causative factor. ~Lenore Horowitz, quoted by Jimmy Carter”

PovertyHealth Care AccessRight To Health Care
Book:Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life
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“What we had done was to seek out, in our chosen home community, those things that were the most meaningful to us. We realized that it is all too easy to ignore the natural beauty and simple pleasure right around us and to complain instead about dull surroundings or the inevitable hard knocks of life.”

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Book:Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life
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“I realize that violence is not more prevalent today than in previous periods of human history, but there is a difference. We have seen visionary standards adopted by the global community that espouse peace and human rights, and the globalization of information ensures that the violation of these principles of nonviolence by a powerful and admired democracy tends to resonate throughout the world community. We should have advanced much further in the realization of women's rights, given these international commitments to peace and the rule of law.”

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Book:A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
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“But we do have something we never had before: we have the added pressure of time. We can no longer wait around for the ideal opportunity. If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, then we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.”

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Book:Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life
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“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization. We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: 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”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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“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.”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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“The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.”

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Book:Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
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“And I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense-I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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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.”

IfsWorldYearsChildrenProblemAbleNextEnergyActingCenturyBalanceDemandResourcesOur ChildrenCrisisSolveSelfishAlternativesDecentOur FutureGrandchildrenOverwhelmedShrinkingChildren And GrandchildrenBeing SelfishEnergy CrisisActing Now
Author:Jimmy Carter
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“Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself-or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else's problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems.”

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Book:Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1977
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“Some devout Christians are among the most fervent advocates of the death penalty, contradicting Jesus Christ and justifying their belief on an erroneous interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures. "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," their most likely response, overlooks the fact that this was promulgated by Moses as a limitation- a prohibition against taking both eyes or all of an offender's teeth in retribution.”

FactsEyeChristianJesusBeliefChristJesus ChristResponseScriptureTeethLimitationInterpretationPenaltiesDeath PenaltyMosesProhibitionRetributionHebrewOffendersFerventContradictingEye For An Eye
Book:Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
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“Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.”

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Book:Living Faith
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“We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth -- one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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“I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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“Our goals are also the same, to have a just system of economics and politics, to let the people of the world share in growth, in peace, in personal freedom, and in the benefits to be derived from the proper utilization of natural resources. We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people.”

PeopleWorldShouldBelieveHumansNationsGoalGrowthNaturalRightsShareBenefitsResourcesEconomicsIndependentHuman RightsNatural ResourcesPersonal FreedomUtilization
Book:Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter, 1978, Book 1: January 1 to June 30, 1978
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“The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”

NeedsLongStatesFactsUseEarthChristianOrderFallUniverseBeliefStarsReligiousTeachSkyLandEvolutionStandingCreatorAstronomyBiologyFlatsAffectedProvenReligious FaithTextbooksChristian FaithGeologyOmnipotenceIncompatibilityGeorgians
Author:Jimmy Carter
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