Rosalynn Carter Quotes

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can't accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.

There are four kinds of people in the world—those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need caregivers.” —former first lady Rosalynn Carter

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried.

During one of his activities as director of Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade, Gacy met and was photographed with the then First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, on May 6, 1978. The famous photograph even has her autograph, an embarrassing reminder to the Secret Service – who gave special clearance to Gacy – that they still had a bit to learn, once they found out who and what John Wayne Gacy truly was.

One of the most surprisingly controversial presidential decisions I made was to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the people of Hungary. It was said to have been given by the Pope in the year 1000 to Stephen, the first king of Hungary, as a symbol of political and religious authority and was worn by more than fifty kings when they were vested with power. A distinctive feature was that the cross on top was bent. As Soviet troops invaded Hungary, toward the end of the Second World War, some Hungarians delivered to American troops the crown and other royal regalia, which were subsequently stored in Fort Knox alongside our nation’s gold. The Soviets still dominated Hungary when I announced my decision to return the crown. There was a furor among Hungarian-Americans and others, and I was denounced as accepting the subservience of the occupied nation. I considered the crown to be a symbol of the freedom and sovereignty of the Hungarian people. I returned it in January 1978, stipulating that the crown and insignia must be controlled by Hungarians, carefully protected, and made available for public display as soon as practicable. A duplicate of the crown was brought to The Carter Center as a gift for me in March 1998 and is on display in our presidential museum. Rosalynn and I led volunteers to build Habitat houses in Vác, Hungary, in 1996, and we were treated as honored guests of the government and escorted to the Hungarian National Museum to see the crown and the stream of citizens who were going past it, many of them reciting a prayer as they did so. We were told that more than 3 million people pay homage to the crown each year. A few years later it was moved to its permanent home, in the Hungarian Parliament Building.

For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.

Rosalynn toured seven nations for meetings with presidents and other top officials. After careful briefings from the State Department and the CIA, she carried personal messages from me urging President Ernesto Geisel of Brazil to abandon his plans to reprocess nuclear fuel for weapons and the leaders of Peru and Chile to reduce their purchases of armaments, and to inform the president of Colombia that one of his cabinet officers was accepting bribes from drug cartels. Rosalynn was, if anything, more frank and forceful in her presentations than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance or I would have been.

He was also active in his local community, a tireless worker for the Democratic Party and, for three consecutive years, director of Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day Parade. Through this latter activity, he was introduced to (and photographed with) First Lady Rosalynn Carter on May 6, 1978. Mrs Carter signed the photo: “To John Gacy. Best wishes. Rosalynn Carter.

There are four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who need caregiving.

When Rosalynn grew despondent about the headlines, Jimmy told her to read from John 14:1 (“Let not your heart be troubled”), and her spirits lifted before she embarked on a diplomatic mission to Peru.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. – Rosalynn Carter

The intersection of faith and human rights provided Carter with some of his most gratifying moments in office. In 1979 Carter and Brezhnev completed what Carter described as a “highly emotional” prisoner swap, trading two Soviet spies being held in the United States for four dissidents in the USSR, including three Jewish refuseniks and Georgi Vins, a Russian Baptist pastor jailed in 1974 for conducting an underground ministry in the Soviet Union. A mere four days after he was transported from prison in a Siberian cattle car, Vins joined the president in Plains for church. “Up early to prepare my Sunday school lesson, from 1 Kings 21—about Ahab, Jezebel, and Naboth,” Carter wrote in his diary. “Since Georgi Vins is with me, the parallel between this lesson and his persecution in the Soviet Union was remarkable.” Vins, sitting next to Rosalynn in the pew, pulled off his shoe, lifted the inner sole, and showed her a small, wrinkled photograph of Jimmy Carter he had kept in prison.

I had learned that you were going to be criticized for whatever you did, so why not do what you wanted to do.