William J. Clinton Giving Quotations

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 think the Democrats are going to have to be willing to give up, maybe, some short-term political gain by whipping up fears on some of these things - if it's a reasonable Social Security proposal, a reasonable Medicare proposal. We've got to deal with these things. You cannot have health care devour the economy.

There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.

I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

We simply cannot afford to give the reigns of government so someone who will double down on trickle down

Turning 50 gives me more yesterdays than tomorrows.

On Bill Clinton: I have a simple question: Who's the last President to give you a balanced budget?

Our immigration policy is focussed in four areas: First, strengthening border control; second, protecting American jobs by enforcing laws against illegal immigrants at the workplace; third, deporting criminal and deportable aliens; fourth, giving assistance to states who need it, and denying illegal aliens benefits for public services or welfare.

There are always going to be people who want to be president, and some days I'd like to give it to them.

The new energy future is decentralised, entrepreneurial and needs people like you to say 'Give me a clean car, give me solar shingles to put on my roof - give me a clean future'

On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment.

The problem with any ideology is that it gives you the answer before you examine the evidence.

The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.

The purpose of politics is to give people tools to make the most of their lives.

You live in a country that makes it harder to raise children than any other country in the world. You vote for me and I'll give you family values.

Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that.

The secret to living a full life with no regrets and to staying young is to figure out what you believe in and fight for it. If you lose, don't give up. If you win, raise the bar, and then rare back and do something else. And remember that, with the accumulation of years, our responsibilities to the future grow greater, not less.

Our paradigm now seems to be: Something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us. And if they don't, they can go straight to hell.

We still have too many Americans who give in to their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. They are special forces. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

We're [Clinton Foundation] trying to get rapid tests that give you results when you're right there on site at an affordable price. Ninety percent of the HIV-positive people in the world don't know they have the infection. An enormous amount of infections are being perpetrated by people who don't know they themselves are HIV positive.