9/11 was a signal that we were living in a new world - a world of interdependence, a world in which people could attack the United States not from the outside, but from the inside. It was a sign that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, could watch the cathedral of capitalism at the Trade Center and the heart of its defense at the Pentagon be struck internally, not really across borders, so that borders don't matter anymore.

The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.

I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures...I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.

Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.

Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.

Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales.

By the laws of the land, people who come looking for jobs in America are illegal. But by the laws of economics, they are following the logic and laws of economics when they leave Guatemala and go to Mexico, leave Mexico and come to the U.S., leave Africa and go to Spain and Europe looking for jobs.