“I’ve lived through a lifetime of crises and survived.”

All the praise I received couldn’t substitute for the praise I had never received from my mother at home.

I never like other people to clean for me. I don’t want them to invade my own privacy.

To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.

Everybody asks me, ‘So, what are you doing now?’ Why must I be doing something? All my life I’ve been doing something.

Men go after me, and I choose among them.

I’m not conniving – that has a pejorative context. I’m not sitting in back rooms making deals. That’s not my style.

You can’t be beautiful and hate because hate is a corroding disease and affects the way you look. … You can’t hide it – ever. It shows in your eyes. It warps your expression. It affects your character, your personality.

All my life I’ve been doing. For now, I’m being — being quiet, being grateful.

Even when I jog, I need a place to get to.

You’ve got to love people, places, ideas; you’ve got to live with mind, body, soul; you’ve got to be committed; there is no life on the side-lines.

And that will mean that we cast aside eight years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears that have gone into bringing cities and mayors and communities to the table to address what truly is a national crisis.

When there is a crisis, the first thing that gets damaged and gets harmed is democracy.

I think to deal with the situation like human crisis, 65 million people being displaced, lost their home, and with such human tragedy, has to make every level of society to be conscious and to be alert about the situation.

That window, which has stayed open for nearly five years, with amazing good will from the Afghans, is threatening to close unless the world wakes up and deals with the crisis.

Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran is nothing less than a masterpiece of moral and political criticism.

We warned when the crisis began in 2011 that unless it was resolved quickly

I’m really good in a crisis, because I don’t panic.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.