[Kids] will grow up into a world that's difficult and wonderful, and they'll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.

All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.

It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?

If you look at the polling data, long before anyone had thought about Iraq, it was the [George W.] Bush Administration's decision in the first few weeks in its tenure in office to abnegate the Kyoto treaties that set our international perception into a nose-dive. People around the world looked on in amazement as the biggest part of the problem decided it wasn't going to make any effort to help with the solution.

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.