There was never any doubt in our minds that men and women were equal, if not more so.

What we've often seen is that when we Americans say, look, we've got to reduce pollution, business - some businesses complain about it, but almost every time, it's turned out to be easier and cheaper and accomplished faster, and they've gained confidence, and then we go farther.

The gay rights movement of recent years has been an inspiring victory for humanity and it is in the tradition of the civil rights movement when I was a young boy in the South, the women's suffrage movement when my mother was a young woman in Tennessee, the abolition movement much farther back, and the anti-apartheid movement when I was in the House of Representatives. All of these movements have one thing in common: the opposition to progress was rooted in an outdated understanding of morality.

The ten hottest years in the atmospheric record, going back only 160 years, have been in the last eleven years.

The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.

The truth is that we're at a critical juncture in the history of our species and if we don't act soon, we could inhabit a world we don't recognize anymore.

The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die... It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated.