I think we are at a new evolutionary stage. We evolved in tight-knit tribes in which we faced death if we didn't have the support of the rest of the tribe.

This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.

Democracy is not what we have. It is what we do.

What we see today is a world movement represented by the World Social Forum, involving all sorts of interactions across cultures, not to create some new "ism," but to learn as we walk and to create more democratic forms of social organization that re-embed economic life in community.

Food has always been at the center of community bonding, of family life, and simple pleasure, but it is becoming more and more an obsession, a source of pain.

I had the realization that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, it is caused by the production system and an absence of democracy throughout the world.

I think that fear of embarrassment is the essence of the human challenge.