None of us, no matter how perfect, can claim that the building of a new society and the marshalling of a former liberation movement into a modern political party all happen in a straight line.

If we avail ourselves to serve in terms of the Constitution, we should be prepared if, indeed, those we serve deem it appropriate to suffer the hardship that comes with our constitutional obligations.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

People are constantly applying double standards. Take the United States, for example. Washington wants the whole world to admire the country for its democracy. Then the government sends out its army, in the name of this democracy, and leaves behind the kind of chaos we see in Iraq.

Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.

I think we'll go through a period when there's a revival of concern about ethics. After Watergate, we got the Ethics in Government Act, which has a lot of additional regulations.

Stacey Abrams - very articulate, very smart, but she just has radical views on wanting to grow government, raising taxes, trying to have these big government policies that didn't work in the Barack Obama administration.

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.