Bill Clinton: “Well, I'm glad to see you all and welcome you here, for many of you, for the first time. As you know, in the State of…”

“Well, I'm glad to see you all and welcome you here, for many of you, for the first time. As you know, in the State of the Union Address I issued a challenge, and as part of my explanation of the New Covenant in challenging citizens to be more responsible, to people of faith and to religious leaders specifically to help us to deal with those problems that we have to deal with person by person and from the inside out, to help us to deal with the problems of teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth, to help us to deal with the challenges of excessive violence, to help us to deal with the things that have to be organized and dealt with literally one by one at the grassroots level. And while I think we have to be more tolerant of all people, no matter what their differences are, we need to be less tolerant of conditions that are within our power to change. And as you know now, for 2 years, ever since I took this job, I've been trying to find ways to galvanize the energies of people of faith to work together on a common agenda that nearly all Americans would agree on and, at the same time, to try to respect the differences of opinion and views. Our administration strongly supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and we've worked very hard to implement it in a good faith way. And I think an awful lot of people from right across the spectrum of religious affiliations in our country would agree that we have done that. Anyway, if you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer. But the other thing I was going to say today--what I said today was that the problems our country faces today are quite profound, you know, the fact that a rising tide is not lifting all boats; that a lot of people, in spite of this remarkable recovery, have not gotten a raise and they're more vulnerable with their health care, their pensions; and the fact that a lot of people find their values violated and their security violated by crime and violence and the breakdown of the social order. It would be very hard to assert that there are more profound difficulties than the problems of previous days, than the problems that George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt confronted. The difference is that in the information age, which gives us these vast new opportunities because the creation of wealth is based on knowledge and that these people have access to more knowledge than ever before, it's also a great burden because words have greater power today than ever before, not only to build up but also to tear down, to divide, to destroy, to distract. And therefore, in a very profound sense in the modern world, it is more important that people be striving for the kind of spiritual presence of mind and peace of mind that will lead you to use words to build up and to unify, instead of to divide and tear down. And I really do believe that. I think that it's clearly different from any previous time. Words have always been able to wound in letters or speeches or whatever. But the omnipresence of information today and the fact that we're buried in it, it seems to me, imposes an even greater responsibility on people in positions of respect and trust and power to use those words more carefully. Personal Morality”