I officially designated every US ambassador on earth to be my personal human rights representative, and to have the embassy be a haven for people who suffered from abuse by their own government.

Trust is very much a part of our democracy.

I 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.

I'd like to be remembered as someone who was a champion of peace and human rights.

In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.

This is the first national administration we've ever seen where the housewife couldn't afford to buy groceries and the farmer couldn't afford to grow them.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.