The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.

America can no longer afford to be as arrogant as we've been. We can no longer exempt ourselves from the global family of concern.

I think there's a lot that the larger society could have been taught or can be taught, but I'm not sure - given how unyielding the larger society has been - that much has been learned.

This generosity that has been offered to the United States says very much about the Venezuelan spirit.

These children and their parents know that getting an education is not only their right, but a passport to a better future - for the children and for the country.

I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

I think America offers a dream that cannot be fulfilled as easily anywhere else in the world as it could be fulfilled here. Although oppression was common to all of us, those styles of oppression gave us the opportunity to see the world in dimensions we didn't quite see growing up in any one place.