
“War is not women’s history.”
“I asked for strength, and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom, and God gave me problems to learn to solve.
I asked for prosperity, and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.
I asked for courage, and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for love, and God gave me people to help.
I asked for favors, and God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted.
I received everything I needed.”
“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.”
“The very essence of leadership is [ that] you have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”
“We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love.
Be poor among the poor.
We need to include the excluded and preach peace.”
“Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with the face of fear.”
“Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the result of other people’s thinking.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
“Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.”
“It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the US does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
