We're wealthy people. We're sitting here in New York, Washington. We live in a fantastically wealthy country. We don't have to worry about food. We don't have to worry about clothing. We wore the same shirt. We don't have to worry about our safety. It's very easy for us to be environmentalists. It's very easy for me to be an environmentalist. It's very easy for me to care about making sure that we protect the forests and the whales, and all that stuff. 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 political science is bad at prediction. We don't gaze into a crystal ball. I do not believe that we predict things.

I was fifteen in college at Tulane. I lied about my age in college so that I could be normal socially. So that girls would go out with me and stuff like that. I just said I was normal age.

It’s foolish to talk of an “Asian century” or an “emerging market century” because events move at a pace that renders this degree of durability obsolete.

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.

International institutions like the Security Council, the General Assembly, the G20, the BRICs, the IMF, etc., continue to be little more than an extension of the (increasingly conflicting) values and interests of member states.