“The real lesson of 9/11 that I think we have still to learn is that this is a world of interdependence, in which all of the challenges of environment and climate change, of jobs, of disease, of war and terrorism, are cross-border problems that cannot be met one nation at a time.”

McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology.

Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.

Injuries too well remembered cannot heal.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant.

Independence used to be the ticket for liberty. But today, security and freedom, whether it’s in the Arab Spring, whether it’s in Iraq or whether it’s right here in the United States, means working cooperatively and interdependently with others.

9/11 was a signal that we were living in a new world – a world of interdependence, a world in which people could attack the United States not from the outside, but from the inside. It was a sign that the United States.

The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.

When they do something stupid, they don’t do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time.

I divide the word into learners and nonlearners. There are people who learn, who are open to what happens around them, who listen, who hear the lessons.

Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales.

Toxins don’t stop for customs inspections and microbes don’t carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.

Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.

I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures…I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.

The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.