To be led by love and not judgment.

That you get out of life what you put in. When you grow up on a farm you literally reap what you sow.

Know the things you are responsible for and the things you aren’t.

You’re going to come up against brick walls in life. You’ve got to go over them, under them, around them, or crash through them, but somehow or other you’ve got to get to the other side.

There was another bill that I think did make a contribution to the crash that I wish I had vetoed for symbolic reasons. They would have overturned my veto. And that was a bill that allowed banks to engage in all these derivatives, like collateralized debt obligations, without sufficient collateral. Now, it passed overwhelmingly. Almost every Democrat voted for it, and we all wanted it because it reauthorized something I’ll call the Community Reinvestment Act. The Community Reinvestment Act, if the government enforces it, requires every bank in America to reinvest some money where they take deposits. And we’ve got 800 billion dollars of investment under it when I was president. Ninety-six percent of all the money that had ever been invested under it, going back to the 1970s, was in those eight years. See, it was a goldmine of broad-based prosperity, and I wanted it badly, and a lot of other Democrats did, and we voted for it, but it would have been overridden, the veto. And I wish I had vetoed it because I never believed — I had a big argument with Alan Greenspan. He said, “But these things only affect investors with 100 million dollars or more. They can take care of themselves.” I said, “Yeah, I don’t care if they lose 100 million, but you don’t understand. If 100 of them lose 100 million, or 1,000 of them lose 100 million, it can wreck the whole rest of the economy,” which is essentially what happened in the housing crisis. So I wish — it would have become law anyway. I wish I had vetoed that and sounded the alarm.

I do think my mother had a lot to do with that. I mean, after all, you know her — it was not near as bad as having your husband die in a car wreck after — he survives World War II. They had a great life planned, and he gets killed in a car wreck, not because of a concussion, but because in a fluke, the tire blows out on his car. He’s thrown out of the car. He lands in a ditch in a field, and the ditch is full of water, and he can’t get out of the ditch before he drowns. There’s — it made it look a little whiny for me to be all bent out of shape about losing an election, and I realized that it was a weird deal. It was 1980. It was Reagan’s election. It was a period not unlike now, widespread resentment over the stagnant economy, the Iran hostage crisis, and I bet I had a hundred people coming to — I’m not exaggerating — coming to me and saying, “God, Bill, I didn’t know you were going to lose. I just voted against you to because I didn’t like some of the things you’d done.” And I remember once — one of the funniest things that ever happened to me. I was driving over to see my mother. I lived in Little Rock, and she lived in Hot Springs 50 miles away, and in the middle of the trip was a little country store owned by a guy who ran the elections in that area and was real smart, so I went in to get a Coke, and started talking to him. And this little boy came up to me in overalls, and he said, “You’re Bill Clinton, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I helped to beat you. I cost you 11 votes, and it was no accident.” I said, “You did?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “It was me, my wife, our two boys and their wives, and five of my friends. We just decked you.” I said, “Why’d you do it?” He said, “I had to because you raised my car tax. The car license.” And so we’re standing on the interstate. I said, “Look over there. You remember when I was governor? That highway broke wide open, and even big trucks were off in the ditch, and I had to send the National Guard down here to clean it up, and we had to fix it.” He said, “Yeah, I remember. I don’t care. I still didn’t want to pay it.” So I was laughing at the guy, and I said, “Let me ask you something.” I said, “If I ever ran again, would you vote for me?” He said, “Absolutely.” I said, “You would?” He said, “Sure. We’re even now.” And I went — and there were no cell phones, so I had a dime. I went and put it in the payphone, and I called Hillary, and I said, “You know, I’m not dead yet. We might have to run again.

I’m most proud of the fact that we produced broad-based prosperity, where the incomes of the bottom 20% rose more percentage-wise than the incomes of the top 20%, about the same as the incomes of the top 5%. That was across all racial groups, all regional groups, and all income groups, and that we did it while eliminating 600 billion dollars in national debt. And I put America on a path to be debt free so that we’d be able to embrace the challenges of the 21st century, and I think that at a time of yawning inequality, having inclusive prosperity is very important to building support for inclusive societies.

Yeah. I’m the luckiest person who ever lived, you know? I worked hard, like a demon. Some would say too hard from time to time, and I over-married, and I had a magnificent child. I have been incredibly fortunate, but I had the American Dream, and it didn’t matter to anybody that nobody in my family had ever been to college.

And I think it had something to do with my grandmother and my mother being nurses, and my mother once said to me, “Once you see people bleed it’s hard to believe there’s much difference in race.

There is always an impulse to degrade people who are different from you, to diminish them, to demean them, and it never seems to go away, even when there is ample evidence that when we work together, we do better. It’s not about material progress or personal comfort. It’s about personal identity, and there are still so many forces at work in the human psyche that lead some people to think that their identity requires them to have someone to look down on or to demean or to feel that they’re superior to, and I think that that’s at the root of all this. It’s the only story in human society. Who is the other? Who is one of yours? Cain and Abel.