The era of big government is over, but the era of big challenge is not. We need an era of big citizenship. There are many important people at this summit, but the most important title is 'citizen.' This is our republic. Let us keep it!
Interpretation
The focus should shift from reliance on government to active citizen participation in addressing challenges.
This quote emphasizes the importance of active citizenship in a democratic society. While the influence of large government may be diminishing, it is essential for individuals to engage responsibly and contribute to the challenges facing society, reinforcing the idea that the role of a citizen is paramount in shaping the future of the republic.
In practice
In a speech about civic responsibility, this quote can remind people of their role in society.
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.
There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.
Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even.
We can't have an intelligent foreign policy unless we have an intelligent public, because we're a democracy.
I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.
We need to learn to work with political systems that are not perfect instead of taking the view: let's first fix the politics, then we'll fix the rest.
The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public.
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