Democracy is a universal value

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

It’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

The anti-globalization movement is one of the biggest globalized events of the contemporary world, people coming from everywhere, —Australia, Indonesia, Britain, India, Poland, Germany, South Africa—to demonstrate in Seattle or Quebec. What could be more global than that?

There's absolutely no reason why at the level of basic schooling that there should be any inequity whatsoever. And [that's] the first direction to go, [but] that need not prevent you from doing all the other equalities that you want.