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

Civility is a work of the imagination, for it is through the imagination that we render others sufficiently like ourselves for them to become subjects of tolerance and respect, if not always affection.

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

I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

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.

Independence used to be the ticket for liberty. But today, security and freedom, whether it's in the Arab Spring, whether it's in Iraq or whether it's right here in the United States, means working cooperatively and interdependently with others.