He noted that Christ himself, although the Son of God, was always gentle with those who were poor or weak. He went on to say that he tried to follow … - Jimmy Carter

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

During the hostage crisis we sent a number of secret delegations into Iran, which was fairly easy to do because the Iranian leaders wanted to maintain as normal an environment as possible and relished all the favorable publicity that resulted from visits by foreign news media. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini gave personal interviews to American journalists. On one occasion we had a few CIA agents in Tehran who were traveling with false German passports, since many Iranian leaders had been educated in Germany. As our people were leaving, one of them had his credentials checked and was waved past by the customs officials. He was called back, however, and the official said, “Something is wrong with your passport. I’ve been here more than twenty years and this is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt and I don’t understand it.” The quick-thinking agent said, “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.” The official smiled, nodded, and approved his departure.

Democracy’s great recent successes — in India, Portugal, Spain, Greece — show that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed. For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.

Well, Scotty Reston asked me that the other day. Always, I think, in your life--and mine as a farmer and mine as a naval officer and mine as a candidate, if I knew everything then that I know now, I would have done some things differently. I made some mistakes in judgment that weren't fatal. I underestimated, first of all, the quality of the Congress, the intense concentration that individual Members of Congress put on a specific issue, sometimes for 25 or 30 or 40 years. They become experts in that issue. And the quality of their staff work is equivalent completely to the quality of my own staff work here in the White House. This was something that I had not experienced in the Georgia State Legislature, when they only meet for 40 days and then go home. There's no continuity of the legislative process in my State. And I was pleasantly surprised and underestimated the competence of Congress. I think it's a very. good thing that no longer do you have a dominant White House as sometimes existed--I don't say the country suffered when, say, Franklin Roosevelt was here and he could send up bills to the Congress and almost immediately they would be voted on without thorough analysis. I overestimated the Congress in its ability to deal with complicated subjects expeditiously. This is particularly the case with the Senate, where every Member of the Senate is autonomous and prides himself on being independent, has the ability if he chooses to delay action on any bill no matter how important it is to the country; a constant threat sometimes realized, some not exercised, of a filibuster. Even when you have enough votes to override a filibuster, it takes 5 or 6 days to go through the legislative procedures to do that. And I think you've noticed that the burden of work we've put on the Congress has just been more than they could handle in the time allotted, so I've had to delay the implementation of some of the programs that I wanted to put forward much earlier. I had anticipated having a comprehensive tax proposal to the Congress by September. And now, of course, we are ready to go with it as far as the executive branch is concerned, but I don't want to send up a comprehensive tax proposal until I see what the impact on the tax structure might be from social security and, say, energy. And as soon as I get those answers, we'll have the package ready to go. But I don't know of any serious mistakes we've made; probably expecting a little too much from the Congress on expeditious passage, underestimating their competence on the other hand.