Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.

One can remain more sure-footed by taking small steps, but perhaps achieve greater speed by taking bigger steps. Of course, one also runs the risk of setting out in a completely erroneous direction. Surely the important thing isn't the length of our steps, but that the objective is clear.

We can't constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks.

I'm very grateful that Barack Obama as president very much put protection of privacy on the agenda today, due to the fact of Islamist terrorism all over the world.

We will take care of every single person in our society. That is our task.

We have freedom to demonstrate in Germany, but there is no place for incitement and insulting people who come to us from other countries.

Democracy must be our answer to terrorism