Berlin is a very edgy place, a very cosmopolitan place. It's a place where completely different ideas and cultures come together and clash in a very warm way. In a very warm-hearted way.

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.

Strong states and blocs of strong states are the only source of power and legitimacy capable of driving an international agenda in today's world.

Whether it is gun control lobby, health care lobby, or abortion, pro-choice lobby, whatever it is, people are always trying to say that it is about restricting rights and they are never really prepared to talk about what the honest tradeoffs are. One of the things we need to do a better job of is actually painting those tradeoffs.

It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.

Everything today is "transient." Technology and its ability to empower actors large and small evolve so quickly that we have to get used to living in a world that exists in a more or less constant state of flux.

I think it's fantastically narcissistic to believe that in the entire universe, with all of the planetary systems that we've already discovered and the countless others that are out there, that we are the only forms of life.