Bill Clinton

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On immigration, Clinton said that he does not know how the US will cope with the aging of its population without increasing the number of immigrants in the country. "You got to have more immigrants"

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"I don't like that Arizona bill but I get why it happened."

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On Goldman Sachs, Clinton said that he is not sure that they "violated the law". He said, however, that the problem is that many of the transactions had no real economic value.

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If Rabin had not been killed, we would have had peace in the Middle East by 1998

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People that have something to look forward to in the morning are not interested in blowing up other people's kids.

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Twelve years later, in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen conference on developing an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Accords, we face a much different situation. We know now that our planet is rapidly warming and that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe we must decrease our greenhouse gas emissions by about 80 percent by mid-century to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Now the real debate is no longer about whether, but how we can do so in a way that does not impose serious burdens on economic well-being.

Roll Call

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“Affirmative action is an effort to develop a systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced long-standing and persecution”

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"I believe that some of the right-wing extremists which oppose President Obama are also racially prejudiced and would prefer not to have an African-American president," Clinton told CNN's Larry King in a wide-ranging interview that aired Monday evening.

"But I don't believe that all the people who oppose him on health care -- and all the conservatives -- are racists. And I believe if he were white, every single person who opposes him now would be opposing him then."

CNN

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"I think they've got a good agenda here, and they need to execute it. I wouldn't even worry about the Republicans. I'd worry about executing. We're not going to be facing adversity politically here unless we fail to perform for the American people. And the president's out there working hard, but he can't do this on his own. And you can argue the strategies of health care out there flat around, but if we fail to deal with it, there is no question in my mind that it will be a cross around our neck economically and a stain on our nation's conscience because of the people whom we allow to suffer."  [Esquire]

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Comparing Obama's busy first year in office to his own, Clinton said, "It's going to have a different ending — he's going to get health care reform."

TPM

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Clinton, on his "evolving" view of same-sex marriage:  "Asked if he personally supported same-sex marriage, Clinton replied, 'Yeah.' 'I personally support people doing what they want to do,' Clinton said. 'I think it's wrong for someone to stop someone else from doing that [same-sex marriage].'"

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From the Nation:  "This spring, same-sex marriage was legalized in Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire. In his most recent remarks on the subject, Clinton said, 'I think all these states that do it should do it.' The former president, however, added that he does not believe that same-sex marriage is 'a federal question.'"

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From this Larry King Live transcript:

[KING]:  Just today, Chrysler asked for another $5 billion. That's on top of $4 billion that it got in December.

Do we owe this to them?

CLINTON: We don't owe it to them. We should only do it if it's in our interests. I believe it's in our interests...

KING: It is.

CLINTON: ...if they have presented a plan that will reform the way they do business -- that will cut a lot of their overhead costs, their legacy costs and reflect the new world they're going to be living in, which will be far more competitive, more dominated by energy-efficient cars and, ironically, maybe more competitors. Because you have a lot of these individual American entrepreneurs now that are producing electric cars who believe they can get into the market.

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New York Times

Then there are the derivatives. There, Clinton pleads guilty. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, opposed regulation of derivatives as they came to the fore in the 1990s, and Clinton agreed. “They argued that nobody’s going to buy these derivatives, we’ll do it without transparency, they’ll get the information they need,” he recalled. “And it turned out to be just wrong; it just wasn’t true.” He said others share blame, including credit-rating agencies that underestimated the risk. But he accepts responsibility as well. “I very much wish now that I had demanded that we put derivatives under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and that transparency rules had been observed and that we had done that. That I think is a legitimate criticism of what we didn’t do.” He added: “If you ask me to write the indictment, I’d say: ‘I wish Bill Clinton had said more about derivatives. The Republicans probably would have stopped him from doing it, but at least he should have sounded the alarm bell.’ ”