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Bill Clinton

90 quotes

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 20, 2008
“If a politician doesn't wanna get beat up, he shouldn't run for office. If a football player doesn't want to get tackled or want the risk of an a occasional clip he shouldn't put the pads on.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 26, 2008
“The world has always been more impressed by the power of our [America's] example than by the example of our power.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, August 27, 2008.
“I just love that rug.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the years ahead, I will never hold a position higher or a covenant more sacred than that of President of the United States. But there is no title I will wear more proudly than that of citizen.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An increasing number of the young people in the IDF are the children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land. This presents a staggering problem. It's a different Israel. 16 percent of Israelis speak Russian. They've just got there, it's their country, they've made a commitment to the future there," Clinton said. "They can't imagine any historical or other claims that would justify dividing it.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, September 21, 2010.
“There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Economist, December 18, 2010, p. 74
“It's a great thing about not being office—you can just say whatever you want.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Clinton on Libya, Peter King, and more, March 2011.
“I am grateful that they have worked together to make it safer and stronger to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I'm grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed. And the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have a -- have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2012-09-05 Democratic National Convention Speech in Charlotte, North Carolina
“I want to leave my daughter, and my grandchildren I hope to have and all these young people, a better world. And I think the reason you should do things for other people at bottom is selfish. There is no real difference between selfish and selfless if you understand how the world works. We all tied together. [...] Everytime you cut off somebody else's opportunity you shrink your own horizon.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Clinton on why he helps other people., August 2013
“The loss of trust is paralyzing.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Presidential Leadership speech (9 July 2015).
“I ran upstairs to see my wife, we literally just sat there and held each other for, like, 20 minutes.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview aired 20 years after assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (27 October 2015).
“Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people's lives.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She loved her teaching and she got frustrated when one of her students said, well, what do you expect, I'm just from Arkansas. She said, don't tell me that, you're as smart as anybody, you've just got to believe in yourself and work hard and set high goals. She believed that anybody could make it.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. So people say, well, we need to change. She's been around a long time, she sure has, and she's sure been worth every single year she's put into making people's lives better.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you were sitting where I'm sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every lone walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything. She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Piece by piece, pushing that rock up the hill.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody who has seriously dealt with the men and women in today's military believes they are a disaster. They are a national treasure of all races, all religions, all walks of life.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade a real change-maker represents a real threat. So your only option is to create a cartoon, a cartoon alternative, then run against the cartoon. Cartoons are two- dimensional, they're easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard. And a lot of people even think it's boring.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face. And she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known. You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way she will have made it better. That is just who she is.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are clear, achievable, affordable responses to our challenges. But we won't get to them if America makes the wrong choice in this election. That's why you should elect her. And you should elect her because she'll never quit when the going gets tough. She'll never quit on you.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you love this country, you're working hard, you're paying taxes and you're obeying the law and you'd like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back. If you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you. If you're a young African American disillusioned and afraid, we saw in Dallas how great our police officers can be, help us build a future where nobody is afraid to walk outside, including the people that wear blue to protect our future.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hillary will make us stronger together. You know it because she's spent a lifetime doing it.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, I don't have all the answers, but I do know the old ways don't work. Trickledown economics has sure failed. And big bureaucracies, both private and public, they've failed too. That's why we need a new approach to government, a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement. More choices for young people in the schools they attend- in the public schools they attend. And more choices for the elderly and for people with disabilities and the long-term care they receive. A government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy; a government that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: William J. Clinton: "Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York," July 16, 1992. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
“Every year Congress and the president sign laws that make us do more things and gives us less money to do it with. I see people in my state, middle-class people — their taxes have gone up in Washington and their services have gone down while the wealthy have gotten tax cuts. I have seen what's happened in this last four years when — in my state, when people lose their jobs there's a good chance I'll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them. And I've been out here for 13 months meeting in meetings just like this ever since October, with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, we can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles -- it's something I strongly support -- we can't be so fixated on that that we are unable to think about the reality of life that millions of Americans face on streets that are unsafe, under conditions that no other nation—no other nations—has permitted to exist. And at some point, I still hope that the leadership of the National Rifle Association will go back to doing what it did when I was a boy and which made me want to be a lifetime member because they put out valuable information about hunting and marksmanship and safe use of guns. But just to know of the conditions we face today in a lot of our cities and other places in this country and the enormous threat to public safety is amazing.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at the Adult Learning Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 1, 1993
“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. That is, when we set up this country, abuse of people by Government was a big problem. So if you read the Constitution, it's rooted in the desire to limit the ability of — Government's ability to mess with you, because that was a huge problem. It can still be a huge problem. But it assumed that people would basically be raised in coherent families, in coherent communities, and they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Television interview on MTV's Enough is Enough (19 April 1994)
“All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. 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.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: State of the Union address (24 January 1995)
“I say this to the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government instead of from those who would take away our freedom: If you say violence is an acceptable way to make change, you are wrong. If you say that Government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom away, you are just plain wrong. If you treat law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line for your safety every day like some kind of enemy army to be suspected, derided, and if they should enforce the law against you, to be shot, you are wrong. If you appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against, you are wrong. How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on Earth live in tyranny! How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes!”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks at the Michigan State University Commencement Ceremony in East Lansing, Michigan (May 5, 1995), quoted in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, Book 1—January 1 to June 30, 19…
“All of you know I'm having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. And I ----. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an Administration, a Congress and a whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice. But I have to tell that in these last days it has come home to me again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned in my bones -- and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us -- the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you -- they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds. And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged. And I heard that first -- first -- in the Civil Rights Movement. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On August 28, 1998 at Union Chapel in Oak Bluff, Massachusetts, speaking on the 35th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Published in the August 29, 1998 edition of The New York Times.
“Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us ... when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to the 54th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 1999)
“It is time to heal America. And so we must say to every American: Look beyond the stereotypes that blind us. We need each other. All of us, we need each other. We don't have a person to waste. And yet for too long politicians have told the most of us that are doing all right that what's really wrong with America is the rest of us. Them. Them, the minorities. Them, the liberals. Them, the poor. Them, the homeless. Them, the people with disabilities. Them, the gays. We've gotten to where we've nearly "them"ed ourselves to death. Them and them and them. But this is America. There is no them; there's only us. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Place Called Hope" (July 16, 1992)
“Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has urged newspaper editors to focus more attention on the depletion of the world's oil reserves. In a June 17 speech to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton said a "significant number of petroleum geologists" have warned that the world could be nearing the peak in oil production. Clinton suggested that at current consumption rates (now more than 30 billion barrels per year, according to the International Energy Agency), the world could be out of "recoverable oil" in 35 to 50 years, elevating the risk of "And then finally, and I think most important of all, more important than the deficit, more important then healthcare, more important than anything, is we have got to do something about our energy strategy because if we permit the climate to continue to warm at an unsustainable rate, and if we keep on doing what we're doing 'til we're out of oil and we haven't made the transition, then it's inconceivable to me that our children and grandchildren will be able to maintain the American way of life and that the world won't be much fuller of resource-based wars of all kinds.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Americans have more freedom and broader rights than citizens of almost any other nation in the world, including the capacity to criticize their government and their elected officials. But we do not have the right to resort to violence — or the threat of violence — when we don't get our way. Our founders constructed a system of government so that reason could prevail over fear. Oklahoma City proved once again that without the law there is no freedom.Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Plant-based diet] changed my whole metabolism, and I lost 24 pounds, and I got back basically what I weighed in high school. But I did it for a different reason. I mean, I wanted to lose a little weight. But I never dreamed this would happen. I did it because, after I had this stent put in, I realized that, even though it happens quite often after you have bypass, you lose the veins, because they're thinner and weaker than arteries. The truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still causing buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass. And thank God I can take the stents. I don't want it to happen again. So I did all this research. And I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy, no meat ... 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up. The calcium deposit in their heart breaks up.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN , September 21, 2010.
“[After struggle with heart disease] I've stopped eating meat, cheese, milk, even fish. No dairy at all. I've lost more than 20 pounds so far, aiming for about 30 before Chelsea's wedding. And I have so much more energy now! I feel great. ... I just decided that I was the high-risk person, and I didn't want to fool with this anymore. And I wanted to live to be a grandfather. So I decided to pick the diet that I thought would maximize my chances of long-term survival. ... The main thing that was hard for me actually ... was giving up yogurt and hard cheese. I love that stuff, but it really made a big difference when I did it. ... [To truly change the conditions that lead to bad habits and poor health] we have to demand it by changing the way we live. You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being, and that of your family and your country.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Clinton Explains Why He Became a Vegan" by Joe Conason, AARP The Magazine, August/September 2013.
“Today we faced an unprecedented assault on our Capitol, our Constitution, and our country. The assault was fueled by more than four years of poison politics spreading deliberate misinformation, sowing distrust in our system, and pitting Americans against one another. The match was lit by Donald Trump and his most ardent enablers, including many in Congress, to overturn the results of an election he lost. The election was free, the count was fair, the result is final. We must complete the peaceful transfer of power our Constitution mandates. I have always believed that America is made up of good, decent people. I still do. If that's who we really are, we must reject today's violence, turn the page, and move forward together — honoring our Constitution, remaining committed to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks on the storming of the US Capitol building, as quoted in Four former U.S. presidents react to chaos on Capitol Hill: "Sickening and heartbreaking sight", KATC (6 January 2021)