“The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.”
“ANDREW DENTON: We’ve seen the recent Senate report into the CIA intelligence failures in Iraq. What do you make of Michael Moore’s argument that President Bush is fraudulently elected and is pursuing a war for fraudulent reasons?
BILL CLINTON: Well, I… Those are two different things. I strongly, strongly disagree with the Supreme Court decision in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000. I think it is one of the very worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made and I explain in my book, in terms I hope a layman can understand, why I think it was a gross abuse of power. In effect, the Supreme Court robbed tens of thousands of their fellow citizens of their right to vote. So, I think that was wrong.
So, on the war, I have a slightly different view from Michael Moore but certainly a different view from the Bush Administration. Uh, the CIA is now being blamed for all this bad intelligence in America. They miss some things, you know. Apparently, they should have known that there was less likelihood of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. OK, let’s posit that. I don’t think they cooked that up for President Bush ‘cause that’s what I was told for eight years too. But the CIA did not say there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They didn’t say that. The Administration did but they didn’t. So, my view is that the President and Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz, they wanted to go to war in Iraq to replace Saddam because they thought the whole enterprise had merit in and of itself – to shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, to make Israel feel more secure and give America more leverage in making peace with Palestinians and Israelis. And I think that, in the beginning, this whole weapons of mass destruction thing, for them, was maybe a good way to get their foot in the door but not the major issue for them.”
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
“While Australia was the first country to give women the right to stand as well as to vote for the national parliament, Finland was the second. And Finland immediately elected nineteen women to its parliament (in 1907) while Australia had essentially given women the right to stand but not to sit. It was not until 1943 that the first women took their seats in Australia’s national parliament.”
“We must be the change we wish to see.”
“After thinking long and hard about what life will be like when we die, I’m convinced that so much is dependent on our life now and on our state of mind at the moment of death. To prepare yourself for that inevitable journey you must begin to take responsibility for all that you are in this life, to look at your life with clarity and assess it with truth. It seems that our delusions about what life holds for us in the hereafter arise from our delusions about who we are in the here and now. If we can accept that we are already spirit beings living in a spirit realm, we can accept that death is not so much a journey to a different world but to a different state of mind.”
“If you put fences around people, you get sheep.”
“You have got to know what it is you want, or someone is going to sell you a bill of goods somewhere along the line that can do irreparable damage to your self-esteem, your sense of worth, and your stewardship of the talents that God gave you.”
“I urge you to: Trudge not through life leaving ugly gashes, Tiptoe not through life leaving half-formed impressions, But tread gently, lovingly and purposefully Leaving graceful heart-prints.”
“Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.”