Jimmy Carter Quotes

“Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.”
― Noam Chomsky

“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.”
― Jimmy Carter

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but rather by what one owns.”
― Jimmy Carter

“If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.”
― Jimmy Carter

“We cannot change the history of the past.”
― Jimmy Carter

“...Carter is sometimes perceived as a failure simply because he refused to make us feel good about the country. He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ´failure´ than to grapple with the hard problems. Ultimately, Carter was replaced by a sunny, more reassuring politician who simply promised that he would ´make America great again.´”
― Kai Bird, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

“It's easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost reelection without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose reelection only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn't, it's unlikely they will.”
― Peter Beinart

“Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [...] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977--never" [...] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [...] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”
― Rachel Maddow, Drift

“We cannot ignore our gift of the future.”
― Jimmy Carter, Just Peace: A Message of Hope

“We cannot know the mystery of the future.”
― Jimmy Carter, Just Peace: A Message of Hope

“...he paid attention to telling us to do things that involve sacrifice... and that upset a lot of people”
― Justin A. Frank

“Carter had diagnosed a political regime in deep trouble, one that would have to alter radically the way it worked in order to meet the problems of the day. Yet, he came to power to rejuvenate that regime rather than repudiate it, to save it rather than destroy it. As the order-affirming and order-shattering dimensions of this project had virtually the same referents, Carter convened a politics in which he could not win for winning. To make his critique credible, he would have to offer potent prescriptions for changing the way government did business. But the more potent his prescriptions, the harder he would have to fight his ostensible allies to secure them; and the harder he had to fight to administer his remedies, the more elusive his case for the vitality of the regime would become. Earnest in the pursuit of his objectives, he could not but drive the disjunction between the regime and the nation beyond repair. The very relationship that Carter sought to carry on with the political establishment served to magnify the problems he had ostensibly come to Washington to resolve.”
― Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton