we must go on fighting for basic education for all, but also emphasize the importance of the content of education. We have to make sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide world.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

In absolutely every way, our lives are transformed by education and basic education in particular. So I would have thought that in any kind of system, to say that the priorities don't include education is a mistake, whether it's [at the] domestic level or at the global level.

The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.

Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.