You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being and that of your family and your country.
Interpretation
Personal and societal well-being requires intentional choices for change.
This quote by William J. Clinton emphasizes the necessity of making deliberate choices to initiate change not only for oneself but also for the benefit of one's family and society as a whole. It suggests that progress and improvement in our lives and communities rest on our shoulders, advocating for personal responsibility and collective action towards betterment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about community service.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
Failure is never fatal. But failure to change can and might be.
Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.
Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit -- unless you find new routines -- the pattern will unfold automatically.
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
The bicycle freed 19th-century women from their homes and from their dependence on men. I hope that in Saudi Arabia, the car will do the same.
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