“We have to choose between dialogue and utter devastation.”

One should mature over 20 years.

The true measure of the justice of a system is the amount of protection it guarantees to the weakest.

Kindness can change the lives of people.

It would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear.

My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

There is nothing to compare with the courage of ordinary people whose names are unknown and whose sacrifices pass unnoticed.

The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

I think people prefer the good to win, rather than the bad.

All right, your knees may be knocking but that shouldn’t prevent you from going ahead and doing what you need to do.

Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given”, it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

I think sometimes if you are alone, you are freer because your time is your own.

As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months.

Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival.

To the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict.

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.

I don’t believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

We don’t usually see light traveling in darkness of space because we only can see its reflection on substance.

Life is the journey between darkness of the womb and darkness of the grave.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.