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

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.

I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

The real lesson of 9/11 that I think we have still to learn is that this is a world of interdependence, in which all of the challenges of environment and climate change, of jobs, of disease, of war and terrorism, are cross-border problems that cannot be met one nation at a time.

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.

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.