I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.
When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don't think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.
It's not necessary to fear the prospect of failure but to be determined not to fail.
You just have to have a simple faith.
I am confident that when the facts and policies have been examined, when the record of performances have been reviewed, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will once again be elected to lead our beloved country to a better future.
Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.
It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.
I don't think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn't at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.
Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.
We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.
I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.
I don't think the Tea Party people are racist, except maybe a tiny portion of them. But there has been a deliberate effort - again, referring to Fox Broadcasting - to inject the race issue into it. They have actually called Obama a racist on television.
I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.
For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
My constant prayer, my number one foreign goal, is to bring peace to Israel. And in the process to Israel's neighbours.
If you're totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American.
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.
If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
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.
To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
There's no way now for you to get a Democratic or Republican nomination without being able to raise $200 or $300 million or more. I would not be inclined to do that, and I would not be capable of doing it.
A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.
I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false.
When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land.
In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.
We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King's success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.
My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
I've used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I've still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.
We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.
I'm an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.
Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn't think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.
It's very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.
