All Quotes

"This guy's a scumbag. That's why I'm after him."

"I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision. It's a shame we have had people who are so damn weak."

"Clinton was so smooth; he could lie his way out of anything. He could stand in front of you, right now, look you all directly in the eyes, and say 'I am not here'."

"Clinton was so smooth, it was almost sickening."

"[[Feminism|[F]eminist]] hypocrisy. Ask me that at a cocktail party and I will talk your ear off about how the very people who had lectured us about the utter venality of workplace sexual harassment throughout the 1980s became suddenly quiescent when the malefactor was Bill Clinton."

"Before there were any suicide bombers, it was also reported by the same sources that Saddam Hussein was giving $10,000 to the families of anyone who was killed by Israeli atrocities, and there were plenty of them... in the first few days of the intifada, the Israeli army fired a million bullets. One of the high military officers said 'that means one bullet for every child'. Within the first month of the intifada, they killed about 70 people. Using U.S. helicopters, and in fact Clinton shipped new helicopters to Israel as soon as they started using them against civilians. That's just the first month... Well, is that supporting terror? It seems to me, sending helicopters to Israel when they're using them to attack apartment complexes, that's supporting terror."

"The Environmental Justice Movement reached what may have been its apogee of transforming national policy on February 11, 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed the Executive Order on Environmental Justice, making environmental justice the policy of the federal government. This Order, among other things, directs each federal agency to "identify and address" the "disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects" of its programs, policies, and activities on people of color and on low-income communities. The Executive Order was a concrete realization of the Movement's goals of influencing decision makers; many Movement leaders were invited to the Oval Office to watch the signing ceremony. The Executive Order was the result of dozens of local environmental justice struggles."

"It's not that Andrew Jackson had a "dark side," as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents-Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama-have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people."

"During the 1990s, the Middle East had witnessed a decade of relative calm, in part thanks to the détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia but also as a result of Pax Americana—post–Cold War, the United States was the unchallenged hegemon. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement had yielded more than anyone expected, including a security agreement. When Saudi Arabia’s defense minister visited Tehran in May 1999, his Iranian counterpart declared: “The sky’s the limit for Iranian–Saudi Arabian relations and cooperation as the whole of Islamic Iran’s military might is in the service of our Saudi Muslim brothers.” President Bill Clinton was basking in the glory of a unipolar world and America was prospering as the indispensable nation. Throughout his presidency and until his very last months in power, Clinton was working on peace between Arabs and Israelis—succeeding only with the Jordanians. Even though people like Nasr in Egypt had their lives upended, Iraq was under UN embargo, and bombs had gone off in the Saudi kingdom, the decade carried some promise. It all came to an end on 9/11. President George W. Bush went to war against the Taliban, who were sheltering Osama bin Laden. After liberating Afghanistan, America declared a global war on terror, a frenzy of liberation. Bush decided to finish what his father had begun—he went after Saddam."

"I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in a while."

"By pandering to the self-interested claims of the masters of finance, Clinton did more to bring on the 2008 recession than President Bush."

"Bill Clinton and his two treasury secretary enablers, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, instituted a system of unregulated capitalism that has resulted in financial anarchy. This anarchic form of capitalism, where everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity to exploit until exhaustion or collapse, is justified by identity politics. It is sold as “enlightened liberalism” as opposed to the old pro-union class politics that saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class. Financial anarchy and short-term plunder have destroyed long-term financial and political stability. It has also pushed the human species, along with most other species, closer and closer towards extinction."

"A f---inng rapist, a war criminal, and a pathological liar."

"It came back to haunt Hillary Clinton in Miami with Haitians not voting for her, so people have long memories. But Clinton's welfare reform, or what we call welfare deform, had such an impact, particularly on single Black mothers. The carceral state was reinforced and made much more brutal through the three-strikes laws, through the mandatory minimum sentences which were upped, through his horrific behavior around rushing back to Arkansas during his election to go and put somebody who was mentally disabled to death. He really set in place the apparatus that we are still trying to dismantle today."

"Clinton's an unusually good liar. Unusually good."

"Much has been written about what happened in Littleton in the wake of the tragedy. As humans go into shock after an assault on their bodies, so do communities. As President Clinton said on the night of the massacre, "If it could happen in a place like Littleton..." This wasn't the drug-riddled inner city, or some supposedly godless corridor like New York or Los Angeles. People who lived in Littleton were upstanding citizens with nice suburban houses and happy, healthy, well-fed children. We expected our schools would be safe."

"Mr Bill Clinton recently made a speech, one of his last as President of the United States, at the University of Warwick, where he spoke passionately, with wit and a heavy dose of civility, on globalisation. Mr Clinton was on the side of the angels when he noted: "If the wealthiest countries ended our agricultural subsidies, leveling the playing field for the world`s farmers, that alone could increase the income of developing countries by $20 billion a year." So why not do it? Why not remove the subsidies? Why not play fair? Why not level the playing field? Why not give the hundreds of millions of farmers in the developing world a better chance to put food in the mouths of their children and a few cents in their pocket? Mr Clinton, a great champion of globalisation, himself gave the answer. It is "not as simple as it sounds," Mr Clinton says. "I see these beautiful fields in Great Britain; I have driven down the highways of France; I know there is a cultural social value to the fabric that has developed here over the centuries." Indeed."

"You want me to fix up lyrics, while our president gets his dick sucked?"

"When Clinton was running for re-election in 1996, he supported a fat package of anti-immigrant legislation. It passed, followed that same year by so-called welfare reform legislation, whose victims include millions of migrant workers-a more accurate term than "immigrant"...Along with the specifically anti-immigrant laws, Clinton combined immigrants and welfare recipients in one big package for super-convenient scapegoating. His so-called welfare reform bill ended 60 years of federal responsibility for helping the nation's poor."

"The current, exclusively Black-white framework for racism prevails throughout U.S. society, even when it is obviously inappropriate. Everywhere we can find major discussions of race and race relations that totally ignore people of color other than African Americans. President Bill Clinton led the way in the first stages of his "dialogue on race" during 1997, with a commission that included no Native Americans, Asian Americans or Latinos."

"Bill Clinton understands even better than anyone sitting here the race thing and Western Christian civilization. He genuinely believes Hillary should be nominated because he didn't believe America was ready to elect a black."

"Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs. White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime."

"Bill Clinton is generally viewed as one smart politician, having been twice elected the President, helped by lackluster Robert Dole, having survived the Lewinsky sex scandal, lying under oath about sex, and impeachment. When it is all about himself, he is cunningly smart."

"I remember when I graduated from eighth grade, I received a presidential certificate of excellence signed by Bill Clinton. It didn't matter how many other kids got the same piece of paper; Aabe and I basked in the pride that the president had affirmed my hard work. Politics aside, the highest office in the land carries great weight."

"The mitigating steps we took were too slow and too small. Countries did come together to sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The aim of the treaty was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2000. However, the agreement was toothless because its emissions reduction obligations were unenforceable. The participation of the US was important and a cause for hope, given that it had thus far contributed the most to global carbon dioxide emissions. The US Congress ratified the agreement and Bill Clinton's election to the presidency that same year seemed to bode well for climate action. But when the new president tried to implement an energy tax as a first mandatory measure to restrain emissions, he encountered strong opposition in Congress and withdrew his proposal. Taxes are the 'third rail' of US politics and, to this day, carbon taxes face a difficult path to adoption."

"Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby [sexual assaults] scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary's campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton's behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn't matter what his personal behavior was. But we're living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It's like ancient history for them; there's no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas. And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky–I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her–somebody who was looking for a father figure."

"For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. Mandela didn’t mince his words when the former US president Bill Clinton said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one – ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do’. He added – ‘Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi, they are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past."

"I was really looking forward to it because I got a shiver of fear up my spine about it. He was my favourite president of the 20th century. I didn’t agree with him politically on a few things, but he was emblematic of my mother and father’s generation and a great communicator."

"This fellow they've nominated claims he's the new Thomas Jefferson. Well, let me tell you something. I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine. And governor, you're no Thomas Jefferson."

"I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration."

"I find him cowardly and spineless"

"The political price for passing the ban included the loss of Congress to the Republicans in 1994, endangering Clinton's agenda, and creating the partisan conditions on Capitol Hill that produced his own impeachment. Even Clinton himself, looking back on the assault weapon ban in his memoir, My Life, concluded that he had likely “pushed the Congress, the country, and the administration too hard.”"

"George Herbert Walker Bush invented regime change in Iraq and Bill Clinton inherited it, and ran with it. The CIA made four concerted efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein under Clinton's leadership.... And I really am tired of all the Clinton Democrats running around getting all-sanctimonious over Iraq. It was them who killed 1.5 to 2.2 million Iraqis through sanctions. Sanctions that Madeline Albright, their illustrious Secretary of State, when confronted with the fact of 500,000 dead Iraqi children, said it was a price she was willing to pay."

"The idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can't imagine."

"The great media lie in the 1992 electoral campaign is that Clinton, unlike earlier Democratic presidential candidates, has moved from the “left” to the “middle” of the political spectrum, and also that unlike earlier presidential candidates he is not beholden to left-wing special interests. The fact is that they tried the same nonsense in the Dukakis campaign in 1988, and they were not successful in fooling too many people. Clinton’s “moderation” and “business friendly” views consist of his promotion of “investments.” But these “investments” have mysteriously been redefined to consist of government spending! The current media narrative claims that the US economy is losing productivity, and that what is needed to improve productivity is higher taxes (!) and increased government spending on “infrastructure”—that is to say, more money wasted on government roads and more money for schools which serve mostly as indoctrination camps."

"In 2008, the United States suffered the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when Wall Street collapsed. Many experts believe that this horrific recession was precipitated by the passage of bipartisan legislation enacted during Bill Clinton's administration that deregulated Wall Street and the activities of the largest financial interests in the country."

"In 1993, during the debate over NAFTA, President Clinton promised us that the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada would "create a million jobs in the first five years"...Unfortunately, President Clinton, Senator McConnell, the Heritage Foundation, and many, many others were way off the mark. Instead of creating a million American jobs, the Economic Policy Institute found, NAFTA destroyed more than 850,000 American jobs."

"After Clinton's failure to reform our health care system, we ended up with a cumbersome, profit-driven, consumer-unfriendly, inefficient health care delivery system dominated by insurance companies. And I mean dominated."

"President Clinton, like Bush and Reagan before him, is supporting a trade policy that protects the interests and profits of multinational corporations, while compromising the interests of American workers."

"This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS. Not only do you kick him, you kick him until he passes out — then beat him over the head with a baseball bat, then roll him up in an old rug, and throw him off the cliff into the pound[ing] surf below!"

"The uncomfortable truth is that, whether you're Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, economic populism is most effective in American politics when it is paired with appeals to racism."

"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

"That sound in tune to you? ... Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone."

"Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution."

"What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free — I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you — the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say."

"It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize that there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing," they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. Yes, Miles, I am apologizing for my stupid "Blindfold Test." I can do it gladly because I'm learning a little something. No matter how much they try to say that Brubeck doesn't swing — or whatever else they're stewing or whoever else they're brewing — it's factually unimportant. Not because Dave made Time magazine — and a dollar — but mainly because Dave honestly thinks he's swinging. He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he's sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it. And as you said in your story, Miles, "if a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down your back, etc.," then Dave is the swingingest by your own definition, Miles, because at Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands...."

"Les êtres humains avouent leurs pires faiblesses quand ils s'étonnent qu'un maître du monde ne soit pas sottement indolent, présomptueux, ou cruel."

"I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs. When and if I feel gay and carefree, I write or play that way. When I feel angry I write or play that way — or when I'm happy, or depressed, even. Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."

"Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand — trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums — whatever instrument he plays — each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer."

"Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you. I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived."