This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind." We're at that sort of turning point in human history.

Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions.

The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

It takes time for change to take place. But then when huge changes are taking place, they are extraordinary. And it requires a kind of philosophical thinking, thinking in terms of epochs.