We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.

Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.

It was as a mother that I needed my mother back, and I needed to conjure her anew and think about what she would have counselled and what she would have given.

Barack himself is very much a regular guy, not a silver spoon, incredibly smart, but, you know, he's a scholarship kid, made good use of the resources that were available to him, worked incredibly hard.

If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.

In a democracy, people tend to get the kind of government they deserve.

The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.

You're a sovereign as a citizen. If you're not involved in your government, you're not doing your job. In the long run that's very bad for the Republic.