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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the skepticism and disillusionment of young people regarding social security and their belief in improbable events like UFO sightings.
William J. Clinton's quote highlights a significant disconnect between the expectations of young people regarding their future financial security and the reality of societal systems like Social Security. It draws attention to the generational beliefs and anxieties about security and the unpredictable nature of life, suggesting that an understanding of these beliefs is crucial for addressing their concerns adequately.
In practice
In a speech about financial literacy programs for youth, one could quote Clinton to emphasize the importance of addressing their concerns about future security.
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.
Our paradigm now seems to be: Something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us. And if they don't, they can go straight to hell.
To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides.
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
Present wars impoverish the lords that win as much as those that lose.
Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.
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