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 … - Jimmy Carter

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

A country will have authority and influence because of moral factors, not its military strength; because it can be humble and not blatant and arrogant; because our people and our country want to serve others and not dominate others. And a nation without morality will soon lose its influence around the world.

Now I want to discuss something that's important to you and me both--our social security system. This is a problem for all Western democracies. Social security, which is probably the greatest legacy left over for us from the New Deal, has served us now for 40 years. But since 1975, social security has been paying out more than it's been taking in. Unless we take action now, the Disability Insurance Fund's reserves will be gone in 2 years, and the retirement reserves will be gone 4 years from then. Some have proposed a simple solution for this: to tax the American worker to the hilt. Well, we are not going to do that. Too many people are already paying more payroll taxes than they do income taxes, and we are not going to go this route to save the social security system. And we are not going to let social security go broke. We're going to keep faith with the 33 million Americans who already enjoy social security benefits and with the 104 million of us, who are paying into the social security system with the expectation that we will receive benefits when we retire, or when we become disabled, or those that are necessary to take care of our families if something happens to us. Now, there's no easy answer, but the changes that I have already submitted to the Congress will make social security financially sound for the rest of the century and will correct most of the problems for the next 75 years--and without a higher tax rate than already scheduled by law for the average wage earner. I'm going to need your help in Congress to get this bill passed, and I hope you'll help me with it.