It’s very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms.

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

80 percent of the export of armament in the world comes from the G8 countries. [The] United States alone exports about 50 percent of the world's armament, [for] which, of course, there has to be buyers, and the buyers are very terribly keen, very often military dictator[s] or sometimes not military dictator[s] but for military purposes. But the sellers are also promoting this trade. And two thirds of the arm exports go to developing countries. I'm in favor of putting a control on it, a ban on it.

[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute