“I have reaffirmed my political will to work towards national unity.”

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

A nation must be embraced, rehabilitated and expressed as a tangible sign of human creativity and as an integral element of mankinds heritage.

A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.

The Argentine literary tradition was believed by many, including many Argentines, to be concerned with a national imaginary in which the gauchos and the pampas and the tango were fundamental tropes.

So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn’t expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto.

The Black Panther Party were not revenge nationalists.

We’re not where we should be in terms of our national economies.

Including the value of natural resources and our social capital in national accounting is a vital step to achieve economic growth that is equitable and sustainable.

The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.