Jimmy Carter President Quotations

I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.

I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents. Primarily because of the activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center, and in international affairs, and to some degree, domestic affairs, on energy conservation, on environment, and things of that kind.

I think I was identified as a failed president because I wasn't re-elected.

I remember the last three days that I was president, I never went to bed at all. I never went to bed until we had negotiated the final release of the hostages.

I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me as president.

There's no doubt that usually a president's public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.

Well, you know, I had been a peanut farmer. I had - you know who was the first president - Democratic president I ever met? Bill Clinton.

When I left the White House I was a fairly young man and I realized I maybe have 25 more years of active life, ... so we capitalized on the influence that I had as a former president of the greatest nation in the world and decided to fill vacuums.

I am deeply grateful that President Bush has taken this initiative and this bold step, because I know that some key people in his administration didn't even want to increase development assistance at all,

Just two candidates have asked my opinion about whether they should run for president or not, and I've advised both of them to become candidates, and he's one of them,

While Mr. Trudeau was in office and I was president in 1977, we celebrated the signing of the Panama Canal treaties, and in recent years, we worked together on hemispheric issues at The Carter Center, ... We will remember him as a vibrant and charismatic man who applied his talents to further Canada and later, other countries in the Western Hemisphere. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

The personal attacks on the president and the condemnations of America by Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, I think, are completely unjustified and uncalled for, ... Chavez is a difficult person with whom to deal personally. I know from my own experience.

The United States has refused direct talks, has branded North Korea as an axis of evil, has declared an end to no first use of atomic weapons, and has invaded Iraq, and has been intercepting North Korean ships at sea, and has condemned the peace initiatives of Kim Young-sam of South Korea and President Clinton in the United States,

Veterans, including myself, would be very proud to have us choose a president and U.S. senators and congressmen and other state officials on our holiday,

We've gone to a couple of places, almost seven. The turnout has been very impressive and orderly,

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.

Anyone who runs for President is certainly adequately endowed with both ambition and ego. Sometimes, there are factors that occur in our lives, unanticipated factors, that tend to reduce the level of ego.

I can get up at 8am and be rested... or I can get up at 5am and be President.

One of the greatest concerns that I had when I became President was the vast array of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and a few other countries, and also the great proliferation of conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, particularly as a tremendous burden on the economies of developing or very poor countries.

When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief. And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions.

If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public, and the scientists. I am convinced that UFOs exist because I've seen one...

If I were president, I'd be very glad to see the Palestinians have a nation recognized by the United Nations. There's no downside to it.

I can't deny I'm a better ex-president than I was a president.

Being president is as difficult as writing the perfect poem. And being president is as effortless as writing the perfect poem. Always a Reckoning, my first collection of poetry, was described by Booklist as 'keenly evocative.'

It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper - deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.

In retrospect, I can see that President Brezhnev was quite proud of the limited agreement that he had concluded in Vladivostok; and to have a new American president come in and say, "That is not good enough - let's do much more, and do it quite rapidly," took him by surprise.

I'm concerned about the negative aspect of political campaigning in american nation, which is a new phenomenon. When I ran for president against Gerald Ford and later against Ronald Reagan we never referred to each other except as 'my distinguished opponent'. And had we criticised personally our opponent it would have been political suicide, we would have been castigated and condemned for it.

I enjoyed being president, but the campaign against Guinea worm [horrible disease] has opened up a completely new career that is challenging and unpredictable and adventurous - and very gratifying.

Each one of us is an individual, just like talk show hosts are different from one another, and newspaper columnists are different from each other. So, former presidents are different from each other, too. Some have gone into relative seclusion. Some have decided to teach.

It's abominable, and it's a disgrace to a great democracy to see what's happened in our country. The main reason for that has been the enormous infusion of high quantities of money to campaigns - governors, Congress, president and the U.S. Senate.