I think the most challenging thing for me in my life and in the Bible is that we worship Jesus as the Prince of Peace. And America is constantly at war.
Jimmy CarterWe cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.
Jimmy CarterI come out of the environment of the Deep South, where I had seen the millstone of racial discrimination weighting down my people, both the black people and the white people; and I had seen the enormous progress that we were able to make after we removed the legal restraints of a two-class society, with the whites superior and blacks inferior. So I was very convinced before I became President that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United States should be an acknowledged champion.
Jimmy CarterMy opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than even (sic) the two-and-a-half years before that. It's only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.
Jimmy CarterWhen I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
Jimmy CarterAs a matter of fact, although we had some terrible challenges and temptations when I was in office, we never dropped a bomb... we never launched a missile... and we never fired a bullet. I think that one of the main requirements for a strong military, like a strong submarine force, is to prevent war, not to cause war.
Jimmy Carter