William J. Clinton Quotes

The arts have long been an integral and vibrant part of our nation's cultural heritage. In its many forms, art enables us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our society. Providing us with a unique way to learn about people of other cultures, it allows us to discover all that we have in common. At its best, art can beautify our cities, encourage economic development and social change, and profoundly affect the ways we live our lives.

The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

You can't be involved in modern American politics without somebody attacking you.

People like change in general, but not in particular.

I'm pretty good at seeing like a lot of different things happening at once and putting them in a pattern and figuring out how you can rearrange it so it might have a better outcome.

In our hearts and in our laws, we must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. . . .

When we give what we can, and give it with joy, we don't just renew the American tradition of giving, we also renew ourselves.

I refuse to be part of a generation that celebrates the death of communism abroad with the loss of the American dream at home.

The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.

You live in the age of interdependence. Borders don't count for much or stop much, good or bad, anymore.

I know that the precise magnitude and patterns of climate change cannot be fully predicted. But global warming clearly is a growing, long-term threat with profound consequences. And make no mistake about it, it will take decades to reverse.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

I mean, when's the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running? I mean, he will have been a senator longer by the time he's inaugurated, but essentially once you start running for president full time you don't have time to do much else.

Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.

There is a government within the government who controll this and i do not controll it

Sarah, there's a government inside the government, and I don't control it.

Somehow we all end up paying for what we do.

To the extent that our workers compete with low-paid Mexicans, it is as much through undocumented immigration as trade. This pattern threatens low-paid, low-skill U.S. workers. The combination of domestic reforms and NAFTA-related growth in Mexico will keep more Mexicans at home. It is likely that a reduction in immigration will increase the real wages of low-skilled urban and rural workers in the United States.

We can't afford to lose control of our own borders or to take on new financial burdens at a time when we are not adequately providing for the jobs, the health care and the education of our own people.

You should strive to find happiness every day and not believe that it comes at the end of the journey.

Learning improves in school environments where there are comprehensive music and arts programs. They increase the ability of young people to do math. They increase the ability of young people to read. And most important of all, they're a lot of fun.

You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being, and that of your family and your country.

More than any other nation on Earth, America has constantly drawn strength and spirit from wave after wave of immigrants. In each generation, they have proved to be the most restless, the most adventurous, the most innovative, the most industrious of people. Bearing different memories, honoring different heritages, they have strengthened our economy, enriched our culture, renewed our promise of freedom and opportunity for all.

You are the most powerful cultural force in the world.

In the new economy, information, education, and motivation are everything.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard and some people think it's boring. Speeches like this are fun, actually doing the work is hard.

I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life.

You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. America can lead the world towards that, but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction. There is a big difference.

My major political identity has been as her spouse for the last decade and I like it that way.

People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.

We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block.

Each generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.

Music is about communication, creativity, and cooperation, and by studying music in schools, students have the opportunity to build on these skills, enrich their lives, and experience the world from a new perspective.

Presidents are not permitted to have personal feelings.

I figured if I could get really good people who were going to be able to have a big impact in the world over the next decade to come together once a year for ten years and actually sign a pledge to take action themselves, if we did that every year for ten years we could do a lot of good in the world. That's the difference between my meeting and any other. If you don't want to promise to do something, don't come to my meeting, stay home.

The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world.

Americans - not just starting thirty years ago but going back to the beginning, when we were rebelling against King George - we've always been of two minds about the government, which is why the framers wrote the Constitution the way they did.

We must say no to illegal immigration so we can continue to say yes to legal immigration.

The only preparation for prospering in the global economy is investing in ourselves.

When times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation.

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.

Character doesn't matter.

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

For four years we've been cooperating exhaustively

We live in a completely interdependent world, which simply means we can not escape each other. How we respond to AIDS depends, in part, on whether we understand this interdependence. It is not someone else's problem. This is everybody's problem.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which highlights customer satisfaction, workforce empowerment, and increased productivity, has come to symbolize America's commitment to excellence.