“With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities.”

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

Humanity lies in man’s capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.

There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children… with the fact of child-bearing out of the centre of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is – something that we must hold in our arms and care for.

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

WE MUST DEVISE A SYSTEM IN WHICH PEACE IS MORE REWARDING THAN WAR.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.

Earth Day is the first holy day…and is devoted to the harmony of nature… The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.

We have nowhere else to go, this is all we have.

We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.

Coronavirus may well represent the biggest health crisis any of us experience in our lifetimes.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.

Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.