Jimmy Carter Quotes

Well, the high councils of my administration are comprised by the Cabinet members and the major heads of the agencies involved. I consult on foreign affairs not with members of the immediate White House staff who might be from Georgia, but with Dr. Brzezinski and with Secretary Vance, on transportation with Brock Adams, on defense with Secretary Brown, and so forth. The members of the Cabinet, I think, are broadly representative of the American people. My immediate White House staff, who don't run the departments-many of them are from Georgia. But I don't think that there's an excessive dependence on them, no more than has been the case in the past when President Kennedy brought large numbers of people from Massachusetts to work intimately with him who had been with him before, or President Johnson, or others. The other part of your question about the Office of Management and Budget-Jim Mcintyre is the head of the OMB and he's doing a very good job. Whether or not I would replace him in the future still has to be decided.

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.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana.

Thank you all. I'm sorry I have to go, but I've got another meeting in a few minutes. I've enjoyed it, and I hope that you had a chance to meet with some of our staff members. I didn't make a speech at first, but I would like to say that it's important to us to have you come here. We learn, I'm sure, a lot more from listening to your questions and from my staff members talking to you about domestic and foreign affairs than you learn from us. And I think it's important for your readers and listeners and viewers to know that this is their White House, and that we don't have anything to conceal here. We've made mistakes. We're obviously going to make them, like you do at home in your own business. But we don't try to cover up, conceal anything. I've enjoyed the press conferences twice a week. Cy Vance has a press conference every month. It happens to be this afternoon. And on many of the controversial issues that in the past have been decided in a very secret way between the Secretary of State and the President, for instance, are now discussed openly with the American people. I feel that's a good move. It exposes our doubts and uncertainties and controversies on occasion, but after that debate goes back and forth in the Congress and throughout the Nation, among American people, we monitor that opinion very closely. And I think that by the time I make a decision--which may or may not always agree with what the people are thinking at home--I have a much surer sense of what our country ought to do. And I think that foreign countries feel, for instance, that when I speak or Cy Vance speaks or the Vice President, that we speak for the country. We also do the same thing with the Congress. I've met with every single Member of the Congress, Democrat and Republican, unless they just didn't come when they were invited. And if they missed one meeting, they've been invited to subsequent meetings. You know, very recently, I've had breakfast with all the Democratic Members of the Senate, and now we're starting to have breakfast with all the Republican Members. We've spent an hour and a half just sitting around a small table, and let them bring up any subject they want to me and I answer any question they ask me.

I have tried, at least most of the time, to set high objectives, to accept failures and disappointments with relative equanimity, to acknowledge and try to correct my mistakes and weaknesses, and then to set different and sometimes higher goals for the future.

Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals to measure our progress toward a stable energy system. These are the goals that we set for 1985: to reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than 2 percent; to reduce gasoline consumption by 10 percent below its. current level; to cut in half the portion of U.S. oil which is imported--from a potential level of 16 million barrels to 6 million barrels a day; to establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than a 6-months supply; to increase our coal production by about two-thirds to more than one billion tons a year; to insulate 90 percent of American homes and all new buildings; to use solar energy in more than 2 1/2 million houses. We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for strict conservation measures if we fall behind. I can't tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy at this late date. This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future. Whether this plan truly makes a difference will not be decided now here in Washington but in every town and every factory, in every home and on every highway and every farm. I believe that this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes that we have to make. We've always been proud, through our history, of being efficient people. We've always been proud of our ingenuity, our skill at answering questions. Now we need efficiency and ingenuity more than ever. We've always been proud of our leadership in the world. And now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example. We've always been proud of our vision of the future. We've always wanted to give our children and our grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we have had ourselves. They are the ones that we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don't act.

I never felt that my dedication to military service was a violation of my faith in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

I'd like to go over in a few minutes some of the problems with the present system, but I would like to point out that the most important unanimous conclusion is that the present welfare program should be scrapped entirely and a totally new system should be implemented. This conclusion in no way is meant to disparage the great value of the separate and the individual programs enacted by the Congress over the last 15 years. These include, as you know, a food stamp program for low-income persons, those who work and those who cannot work; the supplemental security income floor for our aged and disabled; work incentives for welfare families with children; increased housing assistance; tax credits; unemployment insurance extensions; enlarged jobs programs; and the indexing of social security payments to counter the biggest threat or enemy of the poor, and that is inflation. This conclusion that we've drawn today is to say that these many separate programs, taken together, still do not constitute a rational and coherent system that is adequate and fair for all the poor. They are still overly wasteful, capricious, and subject to almost inevitable fraud. They violate many desirable and necessary principles.

The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950's, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940's. During the 1960's, we used twice as much as during the 1950's. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of man's previous history combined. World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970's and 1980's by 5 percent a year, as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade. I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld from the market. You may be right, but suspicions about the oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I've grown older I've become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can't see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.

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

In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.

Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.

The two major items that the Congress is dealing with, of course, are social security and energy. We've had a very productive year so far, and I think when a tabulation is made of what the Congress has done, it will be well received. We've had a major agenda. The Congress committees have been heavily overloaded, and they've responded very well in my opinion. They certainly have my appreciation and admiration. In the energy package we've got five major programs. I'd say three of them have been successfully resolved. We have made a good bit of progress lately on the crude oil equalization tax; we still have natural gas pricing to go. But the committees are working in a very difficult, complicated, and politically unattractive field or subject. I think the American public is in favor of a comprehensive energy package being passed. But they are not in favor of some of the specifics that need to go in the package to make it effective. And I think the Congress has shown a great deal of both hard work, dedication, and courage in bringing us as far as they are. I hope that we'll have the complete work by the committees and a chance to vote on the energy package before Christmas. It all depends on unpredictable kinds of agreements between the House and Senate conferees. The other thing is social security. We faced when I came into office, as was the case in energy, a longstanding problem that nobody had been willing to address. It's not an attractive thing to do to provide adequate taxes to bring the social security reserve funds back into a sound position. The integrity of the social security system is of intense importance to most Americans. One of the reserve funds would have gone bankrupt in 2 years, another one probably 2 years, another one 5 years. And the Congress has moved on that. We now are down to the point of negotiating on particular subjects, the most controversial of which have absolutely nothing to do with social security. But they've been added on to the social security package, just as a legislative maneuver, so that they could be considered not on their own merits but as part of a package that, because it is attractive, might not be vetoed by me. We are trying to cut down on the very liberal add-on provisions in social security because somebody has got to pay for it. And the ones that have to pay for it, of course, are the families that still have workers. We are very concerned about this aspect of social security.

For me personally and for most other Americans, this commitment to peace and diplomacy does not imply a blind or total pacifism. There are times when war is justified, and for many centuries the moral criteria for violence have been carefully delineated.