Top 130 Carter Quotes

One of the best things that came out of the Carter administration was the energy policy. The best things in it were renewable energy.

If I have regrets, it’s around my sons. There is no doubt they were affected by the divorce – Carter more than Blaine, I think.

Chris Carter is just a fantastic guy, I have enjoyed working for him, immensely. I loved this character. I don’t think I can say enough about Chris. It’s just a fantastic thing that he’s created and I’m so thrilled that I’ve been a part of it. I’m very grateful.

It’s a matriarchal family, the Carters. A.P. was the original head of the Carter family, but the women were always strong. There were no questions asked in that regard; you had better be strong.

That’s what I so admired about Johnny Cash and June Carter. Their music wasn’t a big influence on me. It was their character, their individual styles, what they were like as people. They weren’t afraid to stick out.

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn’t a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn’t be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn’t realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.

Lyrics mean a lot to me, and I won’t record a song unless I can feel it. That’s something I learned from Carter Stanley. Even when he wasn’t perfect technically, he got inside a song and sold it emotionally.

Odell is going to grow up. That why’s he is bringing other people in his life so he can grow up. If he wasn’t trying to grow up, he wouldn’t be calling Cris Carter.

Elliott Carter does not write the kind of music that the kids go off to school whistling.

Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, each were told repeatedly, ‘You can’t win.’ They all won.

Whenever I’ve not known what to do, I’ve always gone back to the Carter Family because there was nothing like singing with my aunts and my mom to my grandma.

Pat Buchanan’s challenge to George H.W. Bush in 1992 helped elect Democrat Jimmy Carter.

My first NBA game was in Paris. It was Miami against the Nets, and Vince Carter was playing.

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.

The women’s movement was just coming into being, and I got involved with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and all these great women. We then got involved with Carter, who was running for president, and we created the first International Women’s Conference or the National Women’s Conference for Carter.

The villains will come along. There were plenty in the Carter administration, and there will be plenty with Reagan.

I believe Dad will be respected in 300 years, like Beethoven. As will Elvis, as will the Carter Family, as will Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams.

I can remember – I don’t want to identify the individual – but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.

When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.

If I hadn’t been so outspoken, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t have wanted me.

I didn’t work for Jimmy Carter all those years to go to cocktail parties. I was there as a political adviser, a short-order cook, to work on topical matters.

I’ve had some wonderful times at the White House. I’ve been with Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush.

Helena Bonham Carter was one of my biggest crushes. And Rachel Weisz. I think I told her that when we were filming, which was probably a bit embarrassing.

I look back at Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and especially Betty Carter, whom I admire the most, and I say, OK, they set a standard of excellence. I listen to them not for what they are doing, but to study where they are coming from because, for me, jazz is life experience.

Denzel has been that leading man, but it took him a while to get to Training Day and Hurricane Carter.

When I worked in the White House for President Carter, we tried to do comprehensive tax reform and we made some progress, and other presidents have as well.

Jimmy Carter was unquestionably the most moral president of my lifetime, but he wasn’t much of a president.

I am not predicting here that Obama will fail like Jimmy Carter. What I am predicting is the Republican Party is not extinct and will after a period of time become a strong opposition party.

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

Very early on, you figure out that you put your self-esteem in the hands of strangers. There’s a different commodity. There’s the Helena Bonham Carter that everyone thinks they know, who really has nothing to do with me. But you just have to let that go.

I appreciate people who sway to the beat of their own tambourine, like Iris Apfel and Helena Bonham Carter.

We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.

Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.

I do have what I believe to be a two-CD, authentic, ‘Carter V’ final product mixed down. Nobody knows what ‘Tha Carter V’ is. In fact, nobody can say until Lil Wayne says, ‘This is ‘Tha Carter V.”

I’m really about my family and really proud of being a Carter.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‘Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.’

I remember right after Carter got elected, I was sitting in my apartment in Albany, CA, on a Saturday listening to people call Carter and ask stupid questions while I designed the screen editor.

I was willing to do anything that Chris Carter wrote.

I challenged myself to carry on the style of guitar that my grandmother did: the Carter scratch.

He was everything I didn’t expect. I had just seen him in Get Carter’ and he seemed so aggressive and ruthless. Instead, I found him charming and very gentle, someone whom I’d like to spend part of my life with. Michael was at that time still very much against marriage.

Many people don’t realize that June Carter Cash was my godmother. She and mother were very tight.

There are a whole lot of Carter Family songs.

I love anything by Deb Caletti. She’s my absolute favorite young adult author. I love Ally Carter as well.

I’ve always had wanderlust to try and do different things, but I always return to the music of the Carter family.

I’m trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I’m trying to ‘stand next to’ a subject, whether it’s Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

My favorite movie is ‘Coach Carter’ so I would definitely tell anyone who hasn’t seen that to check that out.

He gave me a picture of himself when I was 14 and it said, ‘To John Carter: My Best friend, Dad.’ That meant so much to me. We were best friends, but we struggled.

Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter’s very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn’t win a second term.

American nuclear reactors are well into middle age. The median age of an operating reactor in the U.S. is 34 years, placing start-up in midst of the Carter administration.

There are no rules when it comes to songwriting, so I’d turn Carter family songs from the 1930s into pop songs.

Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years – and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.

Fighting back against Iran is difficult and costly. No American president from Carter to Obama has been willing to take it on.

The malaise and military decline of the post-Vietnam years under President Jimmy Carter set the stage for Russian aggression abroad and uncertainty among our allies.

Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, I suppose, Jimmy Carter. They balance their tickets with senior statesmen – Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Walter Mondale. (Al Gore was young but played ancient).

Helena Bonham Carter was 19 when we made ‘A Room with a View’. She came for the interview in these extraordinary boots and a black dress, and sat with her feet out in front of her.

I moved back to Tennessee in ’86 or ’87. That’s when I worked with the Carter Family because I really wanted to understand my roots.

During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.

The role of president, as George W. Bush commented in 2000, requires vision, management, and an eye for talent – not so different from that of CEO. But during the first years of Carter’s presidency, his Cabinet was anything but businesslike, beset by infighting and meetings that ambled.

There’s nothing purer than Janette Carter with an autoharp.

Carter Hall is a cross between Indiana Jones and Robert Langdon from ‘Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Angels and Demons.’

In 1976, Jimmy Carter – peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that – somewhat tapped America’s durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

I’m not going to lie. I’d love to have the mic in my hand opposite of Dixie Carter in the ring and say my piece, say what’s on my mind. And if she’s willing to sit there and listen to it, I think it could make for some great television.

Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.

I watched ‘Coach Carter,’ it’s like the best film ever!

One seldom expects the country’s president to adequately note the passing of a rocker, but Jimmy Carter’s assessment of Elvis Presley’s appeal – ‘energy, rebelliousness and good humor’ – is remarkably close to the mark.

Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.

I would say to my colleague that the misery index, inflation and unemployment, when added together is the lowest it has been in the last series of Presidents, even going back to Jimmy Carter. So I think the Bush administration is doing a good job.

I had the great opportunity to work with some of the greatest artists – the Beach Boys, the Temptations, the Four Tops. Otis Redding. Wilson Pickett. Stevie Wonder. So many great singers. And don’t forget Clarence Carter!

We had a party with the rest of the skaters in our trailer and then the next day we were off to see Jimmy Carter. And then we had the World Championships the next weekend, so not a lot of chance to catch up.

Amy Carter, Chelsea Clinton and the Obama girls all had to change schools.

My grandfather read the ‘John Carter of Mars’ books to me when I was young.

Jimmy Carter is the most intelligent. Jimmy Carter is a good man.

The only reason why I’m on Twitter is because Dixie Carter made me. I’ll go on Twitter every now and again and just say some things. Normally, it’s just to hype wrestling and to hype what’s coming on TV and whatnot.

Even Jimmy Carter can’t be wrong all the time.

I go back to read ‘Tarzan’ books every now and again or ‘John Carter,’ and you realize Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a great writer by any means. But he was a great storyteller. You wanted to see what happened next.

Lynda Carter, I think the reason I liked her was because she was so down to earth. Even though she was a big star and she was Miss America, she was very approachable.

Kennedy was like a rock star. Carter was the earnest outsider at the height of Washington cynicism. Clinton was a bad boy who proposed his ‘third way’ of Democratic politics, and Obama brought hope and change to a country that so desperately needed it.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.

I had never really seen ‘Agent Carter’ before I got the part.

I do feel I’m responsible to carrying on the music. That’s what I was charged with as a kid. When I was a little girl, I was told, ‘When we are gone’ – when you’re a kid, you never think they’ll ever be gone – ‘you have to keep the music alive, the Carter Family songs, and add your own songs.’

I met Gerald Ford. I met Richard Nixon. I met Jimmy Carter. I met Dwight Eisenhower when he was a general. George Bush senior. I haven’t met Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, although I got a letter from him.

I would agree that President Carter didn’t live up to the expectation we all had when he came in 1976. My husband and I were young idealists who worked on his campaign.

Like with ‘Outlander’ as well as with ‘Agent Carter,’ I had never heard of ‘Outlander’ before I got the part.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

I’ve never met a woman ever, anywhere, bar none, that was more feminine than Dixie Carter.

Jimmy Carter laid out policies that we now look back at and say, ‘Gee, that actually made sense.’ But you also need to explain it and convey and communicate in a way that provides that tableau, that understanding.

The Carter family history means a lot to me.

We are losing our superstars like Johnny and June Carter Cash and that breaks my heart.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

The fact was, Ford kept stumbling around. I didn’t want him in the White House. I wanted Carter in, and I had a forum of 20 million people watching.

It’s not just Barack Obama, but I doubt Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton would have made it to the White House without Selma.

In some ways I’ve gone to Cash and Carter graduate school.

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ is Jimmy Carter’s short campaign autobiography, ‘Why Not the Best?,’ published in 1975.

It’s not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was. It’s our job to choose who would defend and protect our nation, who would be the best president.

In Plains, I saw Jimmy Carter as he really is – a nice, decent man… in terms of compassionate contribution to society, he certainly has proven to be our best past president.

When it comes to jobs, President Obama makes the Jimmy Carter years look like good old days. If we fired Jimmy Carter then, why would we rehire Barack Obama now?

Thelonious Monk was one of the musicians I most connected with early on. I’m a huge Betty Carter fan, and the way that Abbey Lincoln and Shirley Horn grew immensely from the time they were young is so inspirational.

June Carter Cash is probably my all-time favorite member of the Carter Family.

Anne Carson and Angela Carter are folks I hold close to my heart because they have such unique ways of telling stories.

Aaron Cruden and Beauden Barrett have both been decent, but Dan Carter takes it on to a different level, and he kicks his goals better than both of them.

I have loved Elliott Carter’s music for many years.

I grew up playing guitar in the late Nineties, early 2000s, so a very acoustic-driven pop-rock era, and then in college, I started listening to Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves. Then I really fell in love when I discovered really old country, like June Carter Cash – one of my all-time favorites.

When I began looking into the Carter catalog and came across ‘Will My Mother Know Me There,’ it seemed like such a joyful number and such a song of the spirit that I could hear them all singing it together.

There’s the 7-year-old me that pretended to be Wonder Woman running around the schoolyard. Like, what an incredible thing to imagine that when the bully shows up or the villain, you would be strong enough to do something about it. But, also, you look like Lynda Carter while you’re doing it – like, ‘Oh, my God.’

After the 1960s and ’70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country’s highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.

WI played a young Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC film called ‘A Dark Adapted Eye,’ and I thought she was a completely spellbinding person. Totally unmoved by other people’s expectations, fashions or opinions. She’s probably the coolest English actress there is. Incredibly idiosyncratic.

If I have a spare second, I usually catch up on the many magazines I’m behind on or watch the latest movies on demand that I usually missed at the theater. I love magazines. My top three: Graydon Carter’s ‘Vanity Fair’, Adam Moss’ ‘New York magazine’ and David Remnick’s ‘New Yorker.’

Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn’t just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority.

I like Dixie Carter as a person a lot. I think she’s great.

I didn’t see Kirby Puckett as a Hall of Famer. I didn’t see Gary Carter as a Hall of Famer. I didn’t see Don Sutton as a Hall of Famer. I didn’t see Phil Niekro as a Hall of Famer. As much as I like Jim Rice, I’m not so sure he’s a Hall of Famer.

In his 4 years in the White House, President Carter worked to make the Federal Government more competent and compassionate and more responsive to the American people.

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.

I remember the Vince Carter Raptor days: playing all the video games with him. Playing against him is one thing; having a chance to learn from him is a whole – another level of excitement.

President Jimmy Carter was a citizen soldier. Ironically, he was considered weak because he didn’t kill anybody and he didn’t get anyone killed.

It’s kind of wild for me any time anybody says, ‘I love this movie with Lauren Ashley Carter. I’m going to watch all her other movies,’ because that’s exactly the way I feel as a fan of other actors.

I’m an advocate for gay marriage. I have more gay friends than Carter has pills.

The post-presidency, as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proved, is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions.

What I know of Steve Trevor is everything that I learned from ‘Wonder Woman,’ the television series with Lynda Carter. And I don’t remember much. I do remember his uniform, though.

Eventually, and thanks to my dad, I started working for Total Nonstop Action for $1,000 a show. He was the boss, right under Dixie Carter. TNA wasn’t doing too well at that point, but I had a job making okay money.

The first time I ever saw snow skis was when I was 62 years old and that was 19 years ago and I’m still skiing. So, we’ll be skiing with some very close friends of the Carter Center letting them know what the Carter Center is doing around the world. We have programs in over 65 countries.

In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon’s arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency.

Eric Carter is a more raw, more emotional protagonist. He’s a bit of an Everyman.

In critical ways, Obama has reversed not just Bush policy but every president’s approach to the world since the Second World War, save for that of his soulmate Jimmy Carter.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Though there are many differences between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, they are strikingly similar in their poor economic records and even more so in their shared pessimism and bearishness on America.